Where in the world is Reunion Island, and the real strategy behind Indigo’s flights there

This week, Indigo launched the first-ever flights between India and the Reunion Islands.

If you gaped once and said, ‘Reunion what,” or “Where is it?”, well, join the club.

To the uninitiated, Reunion Island is a French Overseas Territory in the Indian Ocean. And to the even more uninitiated, this new international route fits right in with a very potent strategy that India’s biggest airline has been employing in recent times to scale up its share of international air traffic out of India.

The thrice-weekly service between Chennai and Reunion Island started on Wednesday, and fits in with a string of lesser-known destinations the Gurugram-based airline has selected to operate international flights to in recent years.

Like Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Virtually unknown to the better-known international destinations, the airline started flights to this Central Asian city in 2023, just when it was bubbling under as an alternate tourist destination for India’s budget-conscious travel lovers tired of the usual Bangkok and Dubai circuits.

Buoyed by simplified visa procedures and Baku’s ‘affordable luxury’ tag, tourists from India to Azerbaijan went up from just around 60,000 in 2022 to 2.43 lakh the next year when Indigo started flights.

Similar was the case with Indigo’s flights to Georgia, again in the same geographical area but this time positioned in Europe, continent-wise. After noticing the trend of Indians in the Middle East taking off to Georgia for “an affordable feel of Europe, yet closer by”, the airline started direct flights in August 2023.

And the result showed in the numbers — Georgia has been reporting an incremental increase of 40 per cent or more Indian tourists from 2023 down the years since then.

There is even an aviation industry term for this — next layer markets, referring to underserved destinations that are unknown to many travellers, but popular with regular tourists as well as businessmen. The idea often is to market them as the next big thing for those tired of the regular, traditionally popular hotspots, with the hoi polloi following suit.

The strategy does not always hinge on tourism alone. There is also what is called VFR traffic, or destinations with strong visiting friends and relatives (VFR). Nairobi (Kenya) in Africa will come under this, where Indigo started direct flights, sensing how rival Air India was more focused on the nearby transit hub of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

As would be the Reunion Islands, the latest addition to the airline’s route map. Unknown to many, the French territory has an Indian diaspora of around three lakh, mostly descendants of indentured labourers the French took from Pondicherry (a French colony) as well as nearby areas of present-day Tamil Nadu a century or so ago. That also explains why the flight is from Chennai, and not from Indigo’s bigger hubs like Delhi Indira Gandhi.

Vinay Malhotra, head of global sales at IndiGo, said, “Reunion Island is also home to a large Indian diaspora. Be it for tourism, trade, or visiting family and friends, this new direct service enhances choice and convenience for customers.”

Indigo had opened its international services, focused initially on the Gulf routes as well as the usual Southeast Asian suspects. But this strategy transformed into a new two-pronged strategy.

The first was challenging the hegemony of Gulf carriers as the primary choice of India’s international travellers to connect to international destinations. Realising how it could not wait for all its wide-bodied aircraft orders to come in (the aircraft deliveries continue to be delayed), the airline tied up with Turkish Airlines to use Istanbul airport as a hub.

This it did with leased Boeing 777 aircraft which plied between the Turkish city and Indian metropolises, often carrying as many as 534 passengers at one go. Passengers then connected onward to cities in Europe, North America and elsewhere through code-share flights, mostly from Turkish Airlines itself.

It’s a strategy that Indigo is now replicating at Athens, the capital of Greece — direct flights from India started earlier this year. Greek islands like Santorini and Mykonos are increasingly becoming a honeymoon destination for Indian youngsters. The country was underserved by India with no direct flights, despite the presence of popular tourist destinations in the vicinity, including Italy, Croatia and even Spain.

And the second strategy, of course, has been the ‘next layer market’ penetration, something the airline’s planning team has shrewdly worked out effectively time and again. Destinations like Phuket, Bali and even Manchester (when Air India flies to London and Birmingham, predictably), which have a lot of Indian expats, fall into this category. The Reunion Islands is only the latest in this strategy that is only waiting for Indigo’s long-range aircraft orders to come through to expand to further corners of the globe.