AirAsia cancels Chennai-Bhuvaneshwar flights permanently

Air Asia India had announced Chennai to Bhuvaneshwar flights earlier this year. But now, within few months, they've been cancelled permanently without much of an announcement.

Reasons not known (airlines won't give exact reasons)- most probably they are unable to sell as many tickets as they hoped to sell and thinking they can use the aircraft to fly somewhere else more profitably.

Flight to Bhuvaneshwar from Bengaluru is still operational. But AirAisa India won't sell one stop flights in India for some reasons best known to them. There could be takers for say Chennai-BLR-Surat or one of the 21 destinations they fly to from Bengaluru but no, you can't book such tickets. Offering one stop flight means airline has to offer free rescheduling in cased of missed connection due to late arrival of incoming flights and make arrangements for baggage transfer from one aircraft to another- probably that doesn't fit well into AirAsia India's interests and operating model.

Chennai doesn't seem to be on the radar of Air Asia India- they cancelled Chennai-BLR flight at one point, reintroduced them later, now Chennai- BBI flight is cancelled. MAA-BBI sector didn't have too much competition- only Indigo had direct flight between Chennai and Bhubaneshwar and their fares were generally bit higher than Air Asia. Now Indigo can afford to increase the price further with competition gone. I never saw Air Asia promoting their flights in Chennai- with just two flights- to BBI and BLR, Chennai domestic travelers probably never had Air Asia on their minds. Anyway we can only speculate. 

Anyway if you happen to have a ticket on AirAsia India's Chennai- Bhuvaneshwar or BBI-MAA sectors you've to now go through their ridiculously complicated refund process- explained earlier in this post. Air Asia India's then CEO Amar Abrol had promised a review but since then he has left Air Asia India and has returned to Malaysia. 8 months and nothing has changed. I believe they don't have any intention to change/simplify this process. While I like AirAsia for their ability to take me to a destination for lowest possible price, I had this refund process.

Chennai-Bhuvaneshwar was the only tickets I had booked on Air Asia during entire 2018, as their other sales were not cheap enough. Probably because of rising crude prices and depreciating currencies they weren't able to offer fares as low as they had offered during big sales in 2017. With crude price and currency situations slightly improving, let me see if the future sales offer any tempting fares. Have a few international destinations and a target ticket price in mind-will book if I see cheapest fares that I had seen earlier.