Indigo's New Destinations-40+ in past 6 months

While other airlines in India are either struggling or just managing to stay afloat, market leader and cash rich Indigo is rapidly expanding its network. In past 6 months, Indigo has announced several new flights- 40+ of them as much as I could count, including many international destinations.

Indigo now flies to 15 International destinations and some 60+ domestic airports. Below is a quick snapshot of Indigo. Take a look- particularly ones from your city.

#	From-To	Frequency	Lowest fare
1	Bengaluru-Allahabad	Daily	2500+ one way
2	Bengaluru-Hongkong	Daily	12000+ one way
3	Kochi-Male (Maldives	Daily	16k round trip
4	Bengaluru-Male	Tuesday, Thursday	17k round trip
5	Mumbai-Male	5 days a week except Tue & Thu	17k round trip
6	Delhi-Phuket (Thailand)	6 days a week (Except Wed)	20k round trip
7	Delhi-Kuala Lumpur (KLIA2)	Daily	14k + round trip
8	Bengaluru-Kuala Lumpur	Daily	17k + round trip
9	Amritsar-Dubai	Daily	14k round trip
10	Kolkata-Kochi	Daily	5k one way
11	Bengaluru-Pune	Daily	2k one way
12	Kolkata-Singapore	Daily	13-15k return
13	Trichi-Singapore	Daily	13-15k return
14 15 16 17 18 19 20	Bengaluru-Surat Hyderabad-Surat Delhi-Surat Jaipur-Surat Mumbai-Surat Jaipur-Varanasi Mumbai-Bagdogra	Varying schedules, check website
21	Chennai-Kuwait	Daily
22	Calicut-Abu Dabhi	Daily
23	Kochi-Abu Dabhi	Daily
24	Kolkata-Dhaka
25	Kolkata-Johrat
26	Lucknow-Goa	Daily	4000 one way
27	Pune-Lucknow	Daily	5000 one way
28	Doha-Trivandrum
29	Doha-Ahmadabad
30 31 32 33 34 35	Hyderabad-Port Blair Chennai-Surat Delhi-Vijayawada Hyderabad-Vadodara Hyderabad-Indore Hyderabad-Goa	Daily
36	Chennai-Tuticorin	Daily
37 38 39 40 41	Kochi-Hubli  (Hubballi, Karnataka) Goa-Hubli Bengaluru-Hubli Ahmedabad-Hubli Chennai-Hubli

Some of the routes seem to be targeted directly at competition. For Example, GoAir recently announced flights to Phuket and Male from Mumbai & Delhi. Indigo could have possibly chosen a different city to connect to Male- say from Chennai or Hyderabad or Pune etc, instead they've chosen exact cities like Mumbai, Kochi or Bengaluru from where competition already offers flights. (Spicejet flies Kochi-Male, Air India flies BLR-MLE). I read somewhere that their strategy is to bleed out competition by offering lower fares.

Some destinations like Hong Kong are very good move- not much competition and with clear price advantage Indigo can give full service airline like Cathay a run for their money in price sensitive Indian market.

The fares shown above are lowest possible fares, possibly available for a few seats per flight during early months. Regular fare would be bit higher, still competitive and reasonable enough. I did check the fares during some of recent Indigo's sales- they weren't low enough to be called 'Dirt cheap' like I would occasionally spot during Air Asia's Big Sale. So I am still waiting for some tempting fare to materialize so that I can book- not too many new flights from Chennai, so my options are limited, but have my eye on few destinations- let me see how it goes.

In Kuala Lumpur's KLIA2, I was happy to see an Indian Airline among the display board almost fully dominated by Air Asia (AK, D7, FD etc are all various Air Asia subsidiaries)

Indigo has bigger plans- to fly to far away destinations like London etc. But as of now they are limited by the range of their A320 aircraft- it can't fly far away destinations without a stopover. It will be curious to see how Indigo overcomes this- will they order A330/Dreamliner like long haul aircrafts or will continue to manage with A320s forever.

If I can take liberty to suggest few new destinations for Indigo, below would be my choice. What is yours?

1. Yangon, Myanmar from Kolkata/Delhi or Mumbai
2. Vizag-Colombo
3. Sharjah, from any west coast city
4. Chennai-Phuket/Krabi or Chiang Mai
5. Katmandu from some other city other than Delhi- may be Hyderabad/Kolkata etc
6. Bali, with probably 1 stop over Kuala Lumpur

Best wishes to Indigo.