BANGALORE: Air Deccan’s (AD) Captain Gopinath says that his dream is to have people fly for free, and hopes that one day ancillary income would make this possible-this is catering revenue, advertising revenue, other types of income that airlines can generate besides seat charges.
That the aircraft body can be a medium like a billboard was first demonstrated by Goinath’s. airline in India and was one of the initiatives taken by AD in that direction. Today, AD announced in Bangalore that it has awarded the fleet graphics for aircraft branding contract to ADC World Advertising for a period of five years. This means big money potential to the Airline and how.
“We will be flying around 8 million passengers this year - this means 16 million eyeballs.” said Gopinath.
While refusing to disclose the size of the revenues that aircraft branding generates, AD principal sales & marketing officer, Samyukth Sridharan explained “We currently have 19 A380’s and 20 ATR’s. Branding an aircraft is not as simple as it seems. We have to take into account the cost of paints, the additional weight of the paint added and the additional fuel required for that, well taking all these into account, if I were asked to offer a single aircraft – I’d charge Rs 1 million a month for an A380 and half that amount for an ATR, do the math yourself, and this is just the outside of the aircraft.”.
Gopinath and his team are looking at all avenues for generating ancillary revenues and growing them from the current 9% to between 25-30% of annual revenues over the next three years. They are looking at web-enabled insurance, excess baggage, which currently brings them around Rs.35-36 per passenger on a average, in-flight shopping, and in-flight catering.
“I think in-flight sales on Air Deccan contribute about 12% to Café Coffee Day’s present revenues,” informed Sidharan.. AD receives around 24,000 calls daily for bookings. At the end of the call, our people offer ICIC credit cards or loans, this too will help generate ancillary income for us,” he added.
