Akasa Air is all set to launch its international operations by the end of 2023. The airline is looking at Singapore, Middle East and Gulf regions including Dammam, Qatar and Oman as its possible destinations.
The airline has so far not revealed its international plans mostly due to regulatory permissions and route allowances. While speaking at a recent media event, Praveen Iyer, Chief Commercial Officer of Akasa Air gave further updates on the carrier’s international destinations.
“We see a few markets where we don’t see capacity they should have. I can see Singapore, and a couple of markets in the Middle East and Gulf as well. Dammam is open skies. In the UAE, there are a couple of options barring Dubai, as well as Qatar and Oman. But it is all about how airlines plan their networking,” Iyer revealed.
He further explained that Akasa began the application process earlier this month, and the real work will now begin, to decide where the carrier could fly to, given the constraints. Akasa has 19 planes in its fleet and is short of just one more to meet regulatory requirements of having a minimum of 20 airplanes to start international flights.
Meanwhile, connecting metro with non-metro cities in India still remains the airline’s primary focus as per CEO Vinay Dube.
“Our focus is going to be on connecting the metros with tier-2 and tier-3 cities. While we do some metro-to-metro flying, we have got a lot of metro-to-non-metro cities like Bengaluru-Visakhapatnam, Bengaluru-Bhubaneswar, Bengaluru-Guwahati, and Bengaluru-Kochi,” commented Dube.
Akasa Air now has 17 destinations in its network and has reached the milestone of including all metro cities in India on its map.