Summary
- Vietjet is launching a new service between Ho Chi Minh City and Tamil Nadu in India, with three flights a week.
- The airline is expanding its presence in India due to increasing demand from Indian tourists wanting to travel to Vietnam.
- Vietjet’s rapid expansion in India has resulted in a significant increase in passengers, quadrupling the number compared to last year.
Traveling between India and Vietnam just got easier. Vietjet’s aggressive expansion this year has facilitated a new service between Vietnam’s largest city and the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with an initial three flights a week on offer.
Beginning November 2nd, Vietjet will deploy an Airbus A320 aircraft on the service, which will take off from Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport (SGN) to Tiruchirappalli International Airport (TRZ) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; return flights take off the following day just after midnight.
Night flights
The new route will be served three times a week, as noted above, with the outbound flight VJ1815 pushing back from Ho Chi Minh City at 20:00 for a five-hour flight to Tamil Nadu. It touches down at Tiruchirappalli International Airport at 23:30.
Photo: Suparat Chairatprasert / Shutterstock
The return flight, VJ1816, is overnight, departing Tiruchirappalli just after midnight at 00:30, bound for Ho Chi Minh City. It lands back in Ho Chi Minh City at 07:00 the same day. With the inaugural flight scheduled for November 2nd, the carrier will deploy one of its 18 Airbus A320s on the route. The average age of these jets is 10.8 years.
Expanded presence in India
Vietjet’s new route to Tiruchirappalli comes after the carrier added four weekly flights between Ho Chi Minh City and the Indian state of Kerala in early August. Vietnam’s largest private airline currently operates 32 weekly round-trip flights to and from India.
Vietjet’s continued expansion in India is due to an increasing demand from Indian tourists who want to travel to Vietnam. The carrier plans to expand its service to all capital cities in India eventually. According to a Vietjet official, the rationale behind the airline’s increased effort to boost connectivity between the two nations is that Vietnam is becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination for Indian travelers.
Photo: Phuong D. Nguyen/Shutterstock
In particular, Vietjet’s rapid expansion in India has led to impressive results in this market – the airline served over 300,000 passengers in the first half of this year, five times more than the 70,000 during the same period last year. The low-cost carrier flew over 50% of the 6.9 million international passengers going to and from Vietnam between January and June.
Vietjet’s expansion in 2023 is one of the most aggressive international expansions of any airline in recent memory. It has led to the airline quadrupling the number of passengers carried between Vietnam and India compared to last year.
The airline now operates eight routes to India from its Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi bases. With the latest route, it now has five Indian destinations on its network- Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kochi, New Delhi, and Tiruchirappalli.
Further expansion
Vietjet’s expansive network now includes over 120 routes, 75 international and 45 domestic routes, with almost 450 daily flights. Since April, it has launched three new flights from Ho Chi Minh City to the three largest cities in Australia – Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.
Before Vietjet entered the Australian market, 500,000 passengers traveled annually between Vietnam and Australia. Since the launch of the new routes, that number is expected to double, with one million passengers expected to travel between the two nations by the end of the year.
Photo: Seven43 | Shutterstock
Vietjet also added its seventh Airbus A330 to its fleet to meet the growing passenger demand. By the end of 2023, the airline expects its A330 fleet to grow to 10 jets. These A330s enable the airline to cater to the increased demand during the peak travel seasons and are deployed on popular international routes.
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