Akasa Launch: The hits and misses on Day 1 of India’s newest airline

Few airlines have generated as much interest as Akasa Air. The last two major ones to start were AirAsia India and Vistara.

Akasa Air, India’s newest airline, started accepting reservations on Friday. Within minutes of the booking engines firing up, the website froze! 

Websites are load-tested before going live but the interest that the aviation community and passengers in general have shown must have led to a massive surge in hits leading to the site not being available for a while. Booking resumed soon after with the inaugural flight being sold out.

Also Read: Akasa Air opens flight bookings. Check routes and prices

For those not booking, the curiosity was the product – which was under the wraps until now. The first images of the interior of the aircraft and confirmation of USB ports for each seat and unveiling of the menu added to the clamour to visit the website, leading to more hits to the website in general and booking engine in particular. For booking engines, if the sales are a huge hit, the booking engine performance ends up with a huge miss!

The menu, on the other hand, was confusing until the clarifications later. The pre-book prices were higher than the ‘buy on board’ option. In reality that was not to be the case. The pre-book option comes with beverages unlike the ‘buy on board’ where the meal and beverages have to be purchased separately. To be fair to the airline, it had this mentioned on the first page but not where the prices were listed making it confusing and the talk of avgeeks for the entire day. 

Also Read: Akasa reveals routes, fares, inflight offerings—are they enough to take on IndiGo?

Communication to the market was also a weak point with counting of flights. The schedule put up on the website shows that the airline will scale up to 56 weekly flights within 10 days of operations but the very same page lists morning flights between Mumbai and Ahmedabad to be six days a week (morning flight operates on all days except Wednesdays). This would take the count to 54 weekly flights. 

The airline announced the launch of four destinations which the website correctly mentioned as Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kochi. However, the mobile website does not show Kochi as its destination, instead it shows Chennai! 

How was it for others?

Few airlines have generated as much interest as Akasa Air. The last two major ones to start were AirAsia India and Vistara. For AirAsia India, the booking was on its global website of the AirAsia group which has been in operation for long and thus did not create teething issues. Yet controversy courted AirAsia when the inflight magazine showed the wrong Indian maps. The regulator had subsequently asked the airline to remove the magazine and map from its website as well.

Vistara, on the other hand, had its independent website and seven years into business is yet to give a premium experience. Throwing up error codes for the users to see and blanking out mandatory fields are some of the basic errors which Vistara continues to carry along.

Also Read: Why Akasa Air chose Mumbai and Bengaluru for its inaugural flights

In a market as cut-throat as India with profits hard to come by, investments in IT have been sparse across airlines. IndiGo has been the only one that has been investing steadily with changes visible on ground. A good booking engine and a good mobile app are the very basics that Akasa Air should be looking at along with ensuring that it is up to date! But when it comes to driving bookings, India is still not a market where direct bookings are the norm. Instead it is via OTAs (online travel agents) where the majority of the bookings take place with the corporate ones coming in separately. This is exactly what gets questioned time and again when you have limited funds to invest. 

Competition catching up

Competition is never kind. By the end of the day, IndiGo – the country’s largest carrier by market share and fleet – had its 7th frequency between Bengaluru and Kochi up for sale. One would not be surprised if frequencies are added between Mumbai and Ahmedabad as well, very soon. In a cut-throat market, do these things matter? They may not as long as the fare-paying passengers keep coming in but for a company which aims to have a Digital First approach, these are not the slip-ups one would expect, especially from a top deck which has illustrious achievements.

Yet these are early days – it does take time to settle in but one assumes that it is the best foot forward for the first one! All eyes for now are on August 7, for the first flight.