Tickets to major destinations already booked: Airlines

KATHMANDU, Sep 22: As the Dashain festival approaches nearer, major domestic airlines said their tickets to popular destinations have already been booked. Tickets to other parts of the countries, however, are still available.

But as the rush for tickets is increasing day by day, officials of Buddha Air and Yeti Airlines -- the two domestic airlines with highest market share -- said they were having hard times fulfilling the demand.

Rupesh Joshi, senior manager-marketing of Budhha Air, said tickets for two sectors -- Biratnagar and Bhadrapur - have already been sold out. “However, tickets to other destinations are still available," he told Republica.

To manage the demand for tickets, Joshi said Budhha Air has started extra flight each for Biratnagar and Bhadrapur since last week. But the demand for tickets is still so high in the sector that company is still reeling under pressure to add more flights.

“We are eager to increase the frequency of flights. But the only thing that troubles us is, we don´t get equal demand for tickets for flights back to Kathmandu," Joshi said. To resolve the situation, the company has already announced to cut its airfare on those flights so that it could lure reasonable volume of passengers to Kathmandu.

“Our lowest fare on Kathmandu-Biratnagar route costs Rs 2,600. But the returning ticket ticket of the same flight will cost only Rs 1,200 from October 8 to 17," Joshi said.

The company will restore normal rates after October 17.

The tickets of Yeti Airlines are also difficult to obtain as the tickets are booked for almost all the regions. “Almost all the tickets are already booked, but most of them are not given out. If anyone cancels the ticket, last moment flight is still possible,” Binaya Shakya, senior marketing manager of Yeti Airlines, said “Otherwise, it´s really difficult as the tickets for almost all the sectors are already booked."

Though Yeti Airlines has not yet added the number of flights to any region, it is planning to operate additional flights under some conditions like if a flight is chartered or if they get customers returning from the same flight.

“Till now, we haven´t increased our airfare. But if it´s a chartered flight, we´ll raise the airfare as there´ll probably be no passenger returning from the same flight," said Shakya.

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