By IANS,
Dubai : Leading Indian private carrier Jet Airways will include Saudi Arabia on its list of destinations in the Gulf with effect from October, according to its chairman Naresh Goyal.
“We are going to start services to Saudi Arabia in October,” Goyal told the Gulf News newspaper ahead of the airline’s inaugural flights from Dubai to India.
“This region will constitute a very good percentage of our overall revenues,” he added.
Jet Airways’ inaugural flights from Dubai to New Delhi and Mumbai are scheduled for Aug 23.
Goyal said ever since the airline started flying to the Gulf from January this year, it has seen significant growth in passenger numbers.
“We are flying to Doha, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and now Dubai. We are already the first choice of people flying from the Gulf to India,” he said.
“Our market share is already 60 percent among Indians travelling to India from the Gulf,” Goyal added.
There are over 4.8 million expatriate Indians in the Gulf.
As for the new flights from Dubai, Goyal said he expected the passenger load factor on this sector to be over 80 percent.
“We are already doing very well from Abu Dhabi,” Goyal said.
He also added that Jet would soon enter into a code-sharing pact with United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) national carrier Emirates airline.
“Our cooperation will include code-sharing and frequent flyer programme, we already have through check-in with them,” he said, adding that this relationship would help both Jet Airways and Emirates.
“We will bring a lot of people from India to Dubai and connect them on their (Emirates’) network to places such as Beirut, Cairo, Athens,” the 59-year-old pioneer in India’s private sector aviation said.
According to the Jet chairman, Dubai was a great hub and Emirates has very good services.
As for Jet Airways’ revenues from the Gulf, he said: “I do not have revenue projections to give you at the moment. The total revenue of our company is $4 billion. The share of international operations is 40 percent. In the next two years it is going to be 50 percent.”
To a question as to which other Indian destinations the carrier was planning to connect to Dubai, he said Kochi, Kozhikode, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore were on the radar.
Speaking about the airline’s other international operations, he said its four flights to North America were doing great business because of the presence of a large Indian diaspora in that part of the world.
“Then other people travelling to India also prefer us because our services are better than most of other airlines. Out of London, our market share is 30 percent on the India route. We are doing very well in Hong Kong and Singapore,” he said.