No more lavish meal choices, no pampered check-ins and fewer options in flight timings. Call it Plan B or an effort by the airlines in India to cope with the crisis caused by soaring aircraft turbine fuel prices.
"Oil is changing everything. There are no easy answers. In the last six years, airlines improved fuel efficiency by 19 per cent and reduced non-fuel unit costs by 18 per cent. There is no fat left," said Giovanni Bisignani, director and chief executive officer, International Air Transport Association.
That is why airlines are now looking at extracting cost efficiencies from a component that forms 37 per cent of operating costs, such as passenger amenities and parking and landing charges.
The other major cost components fuel (40 per cent of costs) and employees (23 per cent) provide little room for manoeuvre, say airlines.
"The entire focus is now on how to be optimally efficient, reduce waste and look at productivity within the system. We have to look at every cost item with a zero base to start from," said Sudheer Raghavan, chief operating officer, Jet Airways, the country's largest domestic private carrier.
To this end, Raghavan said the airline is looking at such options as kiosk check-ins. "We will also be taking a long, hard look at the choices we offer for passenger meals and the number of meals we uplift," Raghavan added, but declined to say how much the airline would save from these plans.
Airlines are also talking about collaborating for operational synergies.
"There are options like working towards a common ground handling service where we can have common facilities for multiple airlines," said Hitesh Patel, executive vice-president, Kingfisher Airlines. This is a common practice in the US, he pointed out.
"Another area to explore synergies is in the engineering and maintenance services. But many brainstorming sessions would be required on how we can work around these synergies through the Federation of Indian Airlines," Patel added.
Jet said it agreed with possibilities of working with other airlines and curtailing expenses in the distribution system.
Meanwhile, airlines are also reworking flight operations and routes, possibly offering fewer destinations.
Airlines like low-cost carrier Jetlite are ready to cut shorter flights destinations in the south, especially flights originating from the new airports of Hyderabad and Bangalore.
"Our yields on the Hyderabad and Bangalore routes have declined at least 30 per cent due to the new airports. We are planning to do away with these routes and deploy freed capacity on high-yield routes," said Rajiv Gupta, Jetlite's chief operating officer.
The airline could also look at changing slot timings to major cities like Mumbai. "We do have peak-hour slots but due to congestion we spend more on those slots so we may let Jet Airways take them," Gupta added.
Meanwhile, Kingfisher Airlines' decision on whether aircraft deliveries will be deferred or cancelled will be announced by next week, Patel said.
The airline had already rejigged its delivery schedule early this year, and is scheduled to take deliveries of 17 Airbus aircraft, including the Airbus 330 wide-bodied aircraft and seven ATRs.