Muscat: The Sultanate of Oman's national budget airline, SalamAir, is exploring new destinations in India and plans to set up a base in Salalah to expand operations in the South of Oman.
Speaking to the Observer, Adrian Hamilton-Manns, CEO of SalamAir said, "We will be looking at the Goa in Western India besides the Navi Mumbai as it will give us more frequency into the Mumbai region.
"We are still governed by the bilateral agreement, and that's being worked on with civil aviation authorities to increase frequency so we can add more destinations. We'd like to go to more different destinations like Nepal and Kolkata.
The CEO said that while the airline would like to have more destinations in India, such as Hyderabad, Nagpur, and Guwahati, besides the already mentioned Navi Mumbai and Goa, the first step will be to increase frequencies on the routes currently served by the airline.
Manns said that for the growth of passenger traffic through Muscat Airport, one needs to be more aggressive, and that falls on the airlines to do that. So we are still struggling. "We've got 33% of our fleet still grounded because there are no engines. We will add three more aircraft this year to take our fleet to 18. Once the aircraft comes back with engines, then you'll see a lot of growth. And obviously, India is a powerhouse of growth for us. So it would be something, and it's a market that's well used to low-cost travel, so it fits really well in our business strategy."
The new routes will be launched as per the plan, which includes Vienna (Austria) on June 24, Medan (Indonesia) on July 12, Kigali (Rwanda) on July 21, and Mogadishu in September. "The only one that's not on track that we announced is Damascus, purely because we just don't know the security situation."
Fuel prices
The CEO added, "Everyone's been travelling. The hard thing is that the fuel prices have increased, and the fares have to increase. Lower fares will encourage more people to travel again. But from our perspective, we've actually been quite insulated from the Gulf situation. We lost services to Iraq and Iran, but we are not heavily reliant on the Western side. We've closed Doha, and we do fly to Bahrain and Dubai. We're not in those markets. So it hasn't affected us."
He added, High fares forced to increase the fares, but you don't fully recover. And obviously, so a lot of the people who bought flights in March, April, May already purchased them at a lower price when fuel was at $95 a barrel. So you can't recover everything, and it will impact us. There's no debate, but we're obviously just working to mitigate the worst of the impact."
Focus on Salalah
The next aircraft to be delivered will be named Salalah. "We will base two aircraft in Salalah and fly from there. "We plan to launch routes to India and Pakistan from Salalah."
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