Kathmandu, ANN
The highly appreciated initiation of Nepal Airlines flight to Japan is passing through a worst scenario presently. The recently introduced direct flight to Osaka, Japan by Nepal Airlines has the worst record of passengers occupancy. The two way flight initiated from 29 August and continued till now has an average occupancy of 18 percent only, which is extremely low and has costed the national flag carrier a lot. The national carrier has conducted 15 flights already in the sector counting both sectors, all with very minimum occupancy.
Nepal Airlines thus has been raised questions about initiating a flight route with out proper analysis and preparation and poor performance of the GSA in Osaka. Also it has been accused of ignoring a relatively popular route on Japan, Kathmandu-Narita. Nepal Airlines is not having even a low level satisfactory seat occupancy simply because of the unpopularity of the route and the lack of passenger in this route, the crucial fact it overlooked while introducing the flight in this sector. If the carrier had introduced Kathmandu-Narita route, it would have been more popular among people as a lot of travelers travel in this route. Nepal Airlines seems to have ignored a lot of factors initiating this route and creating a big loss for itself.
The carrier is supposed to have at least 80 percent seat occupancy for the flight to be in profit. But the carrier’s performance now makes it very unlikely to achieve the 80 percent above occupancy in many coming years too. The carrier has already decreased previously scheduled 3 weekly flight to 2 cutting off 1 flight a week. But still the passenger occupancy is pathetically low. The carrier has flown its wide body Airbus 330 aircraft with 276 seats capacity for booking of 18 seats only which is the minimum record till now. It has flown maximum of 149 passengers in its first flight in August 29. Among 149 only 88 were the passengers who actually paid for ticket of the flight.
It is really a matter of concern as every week, twice the carrier flys to Osaka with 18-26 passengers and fly back with 60-70 passengers. Although, the country is celebrating festive seasons very soon and this is the peak season of travelers, the occupancy is not improving. This seriously shows that there is something wrong about the flight in this sector.
Nepal Airlines has a very bad market share for domestic flights too. 6 of its Chinese made Harbin Y-12E and MA-60 aircrafts barely fly in the sky. The aircraft just stays grounded most of the times adding to the huge loss the airline is bearing now.
