IndiGo, India’s largest carrier by fleet and market share, has announced flights to Seychelles. The airline will fly four times a week to Seychelles from Mumbai, starting March 22, 2025. The flights will see the A320neo being deployed and operate on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays at below timings
How do the timings work? Does this indicate another destination in the works a short while from now or takes care of the crew requirements better?
This will mark the third country in Africa for IndiGo, where Nairobi, Kenya and Mauritius are its existing destinations served from Mumbai and Bengaluru, respectively. This is the sixth of seven international destinations which the airline had announced it would launch before March 2025. The others were Madinah, Jaffna, Mauritius, Penang and Langkawi. Mauritius and Langkawi have come up from Bengaluru while Jaffna and Penang from Chennai, while Madinah from Hyderabad. It needs to be seen which Indian city bags the seventh. This paves the way for more tourism in Seychelles with Indian’s literally flocking to new destinations, especially beach ones post COVID. There have been remarkable strides in passenger numbers to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Mauritius amongst others, even as the diplomatic trouble with Maldives meant that passengers dropped to the islands.
Seychelles is the smallest country in Africa and counts Tourism as one of its main sources of income. Some of the top hospitality brands have properties in Seychelles attracting tourists from all across the globe, but Seychelles competes with Mauritius and Maldives for traffic. The currency is the Seychellois Rupee and one Seychellois Rupee is worth six Indian Rupees.
Why Mumbai?
For IndiGo, Bengaluru has been shaping up as a beach getaway with flights to Bali, Langkawi, Mauritius being launched from Bengaluru at times which cater to the same connecting traffic bank. Was it then logical to have Seychelles from Bengaluru? Seychelles is more expensive as a package than most other leisure destinations which IndiGo has and in this case the choice of origin moves up a few notches to a city which has higher disposable income than Bengaluru, with ease of connectivity from Delhi, from where the airline will aim to attract connecting traffic.
Additionally, Air Seychelles operates twice a week service to Mumbai and the market is aware about the destination and its offerings, which helps and is looked at as capacity addition rather than establishing a new market for travel and trade.In terms of distance, Mumbai – Seychelles and Bengaluru – Seychelles are almost equidistant.
Network Thoughts
Seychelles was coming for a long time, especially considering how Indian’s are traveling in recent years to destinations like Vietnam, Mauritius, Indonesia and former Soviet Republics. With current flight count between the two countries at two, IndiGo’s four weekly flights takes the count to six, a three fold jump and possibly the explanation of why the flight is not daily. If the Stretch product does well for IndiGo, and starts working well on the XLRs and A350s, flights to destinations like Seychelles will be prime candidates to see expansion of the product.
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