Air Asia India has issued a clarification rejecting the media reports about its India operation. Responding to Travel Agents Association of India’s query about the ongoing situation, Ankur Garg, Chief Commercial Officer, AirAsia (India), said that AirAsia India remains on the path of serving the Indian market by growing its network and scale of operations. “While the current pandemic has severely impacted the aviation sector and AirAsia India is no exception, we have remained adequately capitalized throughout these months by securing the funding from our majority shareholder as and when required,” Air Asia (India) said in a communique to TAAI.
Air Asia (India)continues to grow its network network in line with capacity guidance prescribed by the government. “We are already at ~55% of our pre-covid capacity and looking to increase to 70% as per the recent relaxed capacity mandate from the government last week. In line with our pre-covid committed plan of growing our fleet, we have recently added a brand new A320 NEO to our fleet in Oct, adding a 2nd NEO in Nov and will add another 3 aircraft in as many months,” the letter reads.
Citing further evidence of the financial stability of AirAsia India is that “we have been smoothly processing all refunds in the last few months and never forced a conversion of bookings during lockdown to “credit shells”. You may recall in the months of Sep-Oct, our leadership proactively engaged in regional meetings with travel agent partners across the entire country and addressed any questions on refunds, long term growth plans, etc.” it reads further.
Air Asia India has not retrenched any staff and have not done salary cuts for employees earning less than Rs 50,000 per month. “Needless to mention, no delay in salary pay-outs has happened for any month since the pandemic,” it adds.
