Lankan passenger travel increasing - IATA

Shirajiv SIRIMANE

INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL: The average annual growth rate for the Sri Lankan international passenger traffic for 2005 to 2009 is 5.6% for and 12.2% for international freight.

"This is a very healthy growth projection Manager Corporate Communications Asia Pacific, International Air transport Association, Albert Tjoeng said.

The IATA Manager who was in Colombo for a brief visit yesterday said air travel in the region is increasing. He said the main reason for this is that more people are travelling for leisure within the region and business travellers too are increasing.

"The SAARC regional cooperation, expanding of economies and increasing number Free Trade Agreements between regional countries also increases business travel.

He said Sri Lanka too is now going in for paperless ticketing and when this system is fully operational by the end of 2007, the industry would save around US$ 3 billion.

The use of e tickets was around 5 percent in Sri Lanka last year and it is expected that it would increase to 70 percent by the end of 2006. Globally the use of e tickets had been around 40 percent last year while in the Asia pacific was 34 percent last year.

He said there are around 340 million airline tickets issued each year costing around US10 per ticket.

With the e tickets no one would lose a ticket and any person can make a reservation and purchase a ticket on the net or just by a telephone call.

Asked to comment on the fuel prices he said the total industry bill for last year had been around US $ 92 billion, which is 23 percent of the airline operating cost.

"It was estimated that the industry loss for last year had been around US $ 6 billion," he said.

He said the low cost airlines are still new to Asia and Asia has around 8 percent share in this business while Europe and US account for around 23 and 27 percent.