A Case About Indigo Airlines
UP, UP AND AWAY
AIR OF CONFIDENCE How Indigo went from being a small airline to a spunky player which took on aviation biggies to grab third spot in the market
Tushar Srivastava
A decade ago, they were just another bunch of travel agents in a sea of similar Commission brokers. But Kabul Bhatia apparently knew how to make sense of the decades that his family-run busi¬ness, InterGlobe Enterprises had put in, doing the stuff and turning it into something bigger.
Barely five years after it started off as a humble budget airline that people hardly noticed, Gurgaon-based IndiGo Airlines has emerged as a big challenger in India 's aviation industry, taking on deep-pocketed industry leaders Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines.
Its strategy to focus on some routes and maximize the impact of its limited fleet seems to have laid the ground for an ambitious takeoff. Earlier this week, IndiGo moved European stock markets when it announced the biggest commercial aviation deal in history.
Topping up an earlier plan to buy 100 planes with another 180 in the decade from 2015, Indigo unveiled a shopping bag for $15.6 billion (around Rs. 70,000 crore) to buy airbus aircraft that would power its ambitions to become an international airline.
Much remains to be seen in an industry which has seen many ups and downs, but one thing that could give Bhatia, 48 - an electrical engineer from the University of Ontario, Canada - an edge, is the intimate knowledge of deal¬ing with passengers day in and day out, unlike aviation entrepreneurs who came from unrelated backgrounds.
His father Kapil Bhatia was an early entrant in the travel industry. He began his career as a sales manager and in 1964 founded Delhi Express Travels, which gradually developed into a group of travel-related organisations.
IndiGo 's growth story has many admirers. Kapil Kaul, South Asia chief executive officer of Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation 's rates the IndiGo suc¬cess story higher than that of
AIR OF CONFIDENCE How Indigo went from being a small airline to a spunky player which took on aviation biggies to grab third spot in the market
Tushar Srivastava
A decade ago, they were just another bunch of travel agents in a sea of similar Commission brokers. But Kabul Bhatia apparently knew how to make sense of the decades that his family-run busi¬ness, InterGlobe Enterprises had put in, doing the stuff and turning it into something bigger.
Barely five years after it started off as a humble budget airline that people hardly noticed, Gurgaon-based IndiGo Airlines has emerged as a big challenger in India 's aviation industry, taking on deep-pocketed industry leaders Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines.
Its strategy to focus on some routes and maximize the impact of its limited fleet seems to have laid the ground for an ambitious takeoff. Earlier this week, IndiGo moved European stock markets when it announced the biggest commercial aviation deal in history.
Topping up an earlier plan to buy 100 planes with another 180 in the decade from 2015, Indigo unveiled a shopping bag for $15.6 billion (around Rs. 70,000 crore) to buy airbus aircraft that would power its ambitions to become an international airline.
Much remains to be seen in an industry which has seen many ups and downs, but one thing that could give Bhatia, 48 - an electrical engineer from the University of Ontario, Canada - an edge, is the intimate knowledge of deal¬ing with passengers day in and day out, unlike aviation entrepreneurs who came from unrelated backgrounds.
His father Kapil Bhatia was an early entrant in the travel industry. He began his career as a sales manager and in 1964 founded Delhi Express Travels, which gradually developed into a group of travel-related organisations.
IndiGo 's growth story has many admirers. Kapil Kaul, South Asia chief executive officer of Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation 's rates the IndiGo suc¬cess story higher than that of