Can IndiGo beat SpiceJet in the battle for regional skies?
India’s biggest airline has been outpaced by SpiceJet in the expansion of services to smaller cities and towns. But it may yet turn out to be the tortoise of the race.
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Editor's note: Nowadays wherever IndiGo goes, it seems to run into SpiceJet. With a market share of nearly 60%, IndiGo lords over Indian aviation. But, when it comes to regional routes, it is playing second fiddle to its rival. IndiGo started flying from Jabalpur earlier this month. SpiceJet beat it by a month. Gwalior, from where IndiGo will have its inaugural flight in September, saw its peer debut in July. The story is similar in Leh, Darbhanga and Rajkot. Everywhere that the white-and-blue jet lands, the airplane in red and white is already parked. In fact, IndiGo seems to have woken up late to the regional party. In January, the airline announced that it would launch seven new stations by May. All seven are Tier-3 or -4 cities—Leh, Darbhanga, Agra, Kurnool, Bareilly, Durgapur and Rajkot. It was an unusual announcement by the low-cost behemoth, which had never revealed its network expansion plans months in advance earlier. Not that it mattered much to SpiceJet. The Ajay Singh-led airline had started flying from Leh in 2018, and added Darbhanga to its destinations in September …
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