Thaindian News

New Delhi, Feb 11 (IANS) Bucking the trend of Indian carriers, including budget airlines, withdrawing promotional fares and hiking base tariff, low-cost carrier JetLite Wednesday introduced a promotional base fare of Re.1.
The new base fare has been offered even on premier sectors like Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi- Hyderabad, and Mumbai-Chennai routes. Air fuel and other surcharges are extra.

JetLite’s parent carrier, Jet Airways, will have a Rs.300 base fare on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Mumbai-Goa, Delhi-Jaipur, Delhi-Srinagar, Kolkata-Bagdogra, Kolkata-Jorhat, Chennai-Kochi, Chennai-Hyderabad and Hyderabad-Indore sectors.

“These fares are valid with immediate effect, until April 30, 2009, on both carriers,” Jet Airways said in a statement.

Jet’s move comes a day after Indian carriers, including budget airlines, decided to withdraw promotional fares, which in some cases were as low as Rs.99 excluding taxes, and hiked their base tariff by up to Rs.2,000 per ticket on some sectors.

The steepest hike of between Rs.1,800-Rs.2,000 per passenger was expected on the Mumbai-Delhi sector, airline industry sources said, adding it was difficult to quantify by how much the fares will be up on individual routes.

“We have discontinued our promotional fares,” said a spokesperson for the state-run carrier Air India, the “response has not been very good”.

“We have closed low fare buckets and are concentrating on selling higher fare buckets. Our focus is on revenue and not seat factors,” said a spokesperson for Kingfisher, even as officials at SpiceJet, Indigo and GoAir also said they were hiking their base fares.