India's Ryanair lands in Europe to continue its global expansion

LondonAfter a nine-and-a-half-hour flight from Mumbai, India's economic capital, an IndiGo Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner (chartered by Norse Atlantic Airways) landed at Manchester Airport at 9:28 a.m. local time on July 1. With this flight, India's leading airline made its debut in European skies. The following day, July 2, the second route to the Old Continent opened, this time between Mumbai and Amsterdam, also with three weekly frequencies, like the one to Manchester. Before the end of the year, IndiGo plans to launch direct connections to Athens, Copenhagen, and London.

By December, IndiGo will operate 50 international routes, in addition to the more than 90 domestic and regional routes it already operates. At the time of takeoff of the Mumbai-Manchester flight, the company's CEO, Dutchman Pieter Elbers – former CEO of KLM between 2014 and 2022 – assured corporate channels: "This moment marks our transition to a growing regional airline."

IndiGo is not yet twenty years old – its inaugural flight was on August 4, 2006, with a route from New Delhi to Imphal, with a stopover in Guwahati – but in that time it has gone from being a low-cost airline – the British press has dubbed it a "local India" for Ryanair. It has a 64% market share, almost double the 37% it had a decade ago. It offers 2,200 daily flights to 127 destinations (domestic and international).

In an environment where other companies have failed—Go First, Kingfisher Airlines, or Jet Airways, all founded in the 1990s and now defunct—IndiGo has succeeded. And its expansion plans are enormously ambitious. Last year, IndiGo ordered thirty Airbus long-range, wide-body aircraft (Airbus A350s), which it plans to begin adding to its fleet starting in 2027. This order follows the 2023 order, when IndiGo closed a deal to purchase 500 narrow-body aircraft—a large deal in the history of the aeronautical industry. IndiGo is already, in fact, the world's largest customer of Airbus A320neo aircraft.

The 2023 agreement brings the total number of aircraft ordered by the company to 900 and will increase its fleet to more than 1,300. The 500 new aircraft are to be delivered between 2030 and 2035. By the end of the current decade, the company's fleet will have grown from the current 410 aircraft to 600, and will continue to grow. As CEO Pieter Elbers says, "from a certain point [in 2027] we will receive a new aircraft every week until the middle of the next decade."

Gender-specific seat selection

Economic growth and the rise of the middle class in India have created a growing demand for domestic flights and, progressively, for international flights, which the company has been able to capture with an offering tailored to the needs of this new public. In this way, IndiGo has managed to build loyalty among three million customers in India in just one year, thanks to a business model based on efficiency, simplicity, and adaptation to the local market.

This is also explained by the prices of the new flights to Europe (€500 for the lowest return fare between Mumbai and Manchester) and the fact that IndiGo offers some variations compared to the traditional low-cost companies, including intercontinental ones such as Level and Norse. Both economy class passengers and those in Stretch class (as they call it, from the business) will receive free hot meals, and those in premium class will also enjoy free alcoholic beverages. The meal for passengers in the lowest economy class will be vegetarian by default; reservations are required if you prefer meat or fish. One checked baggage allowance is also included in the price.

One of the keys to this efficiency is the homogeneous fleet, currently made up almost exclusively of Airbus A320s. This uniformity facilitates maintenance, crew training, and logistics management, which significantly reduces costs. Furthermore, based on suggestions made by passengers in service satisfaction surveys, IndiGo has become the first airline in the world to allow what they call "gender-segregated cabins." From August 2024, female customers can know the gender of their fellow passengers when booking a seat, so they can avoid sitting next to a man if they wish. A possibility that some UK media commentators have called for to be extended to travel next to children or even obese or profane passengers.

All this has meant that while Air India continues to accumulate losses—and fastens its seatbelt while waiting for the report on the airline's operations in the middle of this month—it is the causes of the accident that ended the lives of 260 people On June 12, IndiGo reported record net profits of €304 million for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2024-2025, which ended on March 31. This figure represents a 21% increase year-on-year. For the entire fiscal year, IndiGo's net profit amounted to €725 million.

The CEO highlights that the 120 million passengers it carries annually—more than Air France-KLM—make it the third-largest low-cost airline operator in the world, behind Southwest (in the United States) and Ryanair (in Europe). Elbers is confident that the figure will reach 200 million passengers annually by 2030 and that the low-cost label will soon be a memory of a time in global aviation that will never return. At least not for IndiGo, which is confident that the number of international tourists to India will increase significantly in the near future—currently at 9.3 million a year. "India is a country waiting to be discovered," Elbers emphasizes.