Running out of headlines - next new airline in India

Air Costa will operate its first flight on October 14, 2013, running regional operations based out of Vijayawada (VGA), to BLR, MAA, HYD, JAI and AMD. They propose to start with a fleet of 2 Embraer 170s, expects to receive 2 more Embraer (190) by November, and has plans of 10 jets by 2014 and 25 by 2018, flying to 25 destinations then. According to their initial plans they were supposed to operate out of HYD and MAA as hubs, but I suppose the move to VGA is a result of recent political turmoil in the current state of Andhra Pradesh, whose capital city is HYD.

This report in The Hindu has some information, and there was precious little in the media until Monday last (7 October). But there does seem to be a little more now. It is not yet clear if Air Costa will be a full service carrier or a low cost provider. The Centre for Aviation has just this to say about Air Costa !

Air Costa is a start-up regional carrier to be based out of Andhra Pradesh, stated it plans to launch operations shortly with Hyderabad and Chennai as hubs of operations. Lingamaneni Estates Private Ltd. proposes to launch operations with a fleet of five Bombardier Q400 aircraft on several routes in South India.

But I finally managed to get on to their website, and while it is functional, there's a lot of links there that don't work. One of them was this!

UPDATE
I actually priced out a ticket, and it shows a base fare of INR 9 per sector. Taxes, though, are a little over Rs 4,300 each way, for the sector I picked - MAA-JAI-MAA.



So, anyway...here's what I found:

Route map

It is posted here. Strangely, the homepage offers bookings on some routes that aren't on this route map!



Schedule / timetable

The plan seems to be to run 10 routes a day, every day of the week, between 5 cities. Here is the summary of the schedule, and you can see it online here.



Strangely, the schedule is published only till 26 October 2013 - wonder why!

Bookings, online check-in

You can book on their website, and also manage bookings, as well as execute online check ins. I tried a sample itinerary, and was able to price it, though I haven't ticketed it. The prices seem competitive. For instance, I recently did MAA-JAI on work. The total cost on both 9W and 6E came up to Rs 20k for a return trip. On the other hand, Air Costa offers the same thing for less than 10k, and that's on direct flights (9W and 6E were hopping through DEL / AMD respectively). Now, THAT's really competitive pricing!

Other stuff

As I mentioned before, there's a lot about their website that isn't functional. One of the things I spotted was their careers page. They have quite a few openings, so I'm not sure if and when they'll get their flights off the ground!

On the whole, I get a very Paramount Airways type of feeling about Air Costa. And its not just the Embraers...I hope they don't go pear shaped, the way Paramount did!

Conclusion

I've written recently about the increasing number of players in the Indian aviation market - you can read about those, here and here. I expect a lot of good news for fliers, with competition hopefully resulting in better service and lower fares. But there will be blood, that's for sure!

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