Red Eye Flights in India for Domestic Travel

Red Eye flight is a synonymous term with international travelers. But most of the domestic travelers don`t even know what it is. A Red Eye flight is a flight which departs late in the night and arrives early next morning. It is called red eye because, when you are supposed to sleep, you actually, are awake, leading to red eyes and tiredness and so the term has been coined "Red Eye".

Generally, domestic travel is restricted only during the day time, as the source and destination fall in the same time zone, so most of the times, domestic flights are seen to be operated in the day time only. Consequences, the flights fly all day and then at night they sit at the airport (literally, to me it seems that even the flights would snoring making those noises). For any airlines, a flight sitting on the airport even for an extra minute is a loss meter, because it does not make the airline company any profit unless it flies.

AirAsia India has come up with a unique strategy to operate red eye flights in India. When a flight operates during day time, then the in air time of the flight is 13 hours a day, which for a budget carrier is low. The more they fly, the more profits they generate. So operating an additional late night flights allows them to have an in air time of 16 hours. This also makes the fare more competitive, as not everyone would want to travel late night, plus, the flyer gets the advantage of a cheaper ticket option.  It would be interesting to see how the load factor is going to be, as majority of the travelers prefer the timing between 10am and 6pm for their domestic travel.

Another notable point is that, smaller airport which don`t have much capacity will be able to perform better as the night slots becomes available all of a sudden and thus, the number of passengers being able to use the facilities with the existing infrastructure would increase as well.

However, it will be interesting to see how these flights fare in the metro cities where at night time only international flights are operated. It should be a tough drive for budget airlines to buy night time landing and take-off slots because those shall be priced higher as, foreign airlines get in metro cities with big planes and they can afford it due to more passenger carrying capacity.