PT Garuda Indonesia (Persero) Tbk. Denpasar Branch Office has targeted a 10 percent growth this year compared to 2015.
Micky Irfandi, General Manager of Garuda Indonesia Denpasar Branch Office, said he is optimistic of achieving the target through a wide range of efforts, though he admitted that Q1 2016 sales has yet to show any positive signal.
“In Q1 2016, we actually saw a decrease of 14 percent compared to the same period last year. One of the factor that affected the decrease was unstable global economy, which has made people and companies or agencies to be more efficient,” Micky said, Monday, April 18, 2016.
Based on the data of Bali Statistic Agency, the number international departure from I Gusti Ngurah Rai airport in February 2016 was 2,423 flight departures. The figure was down by 2.73 from previous month of 2,491 flights.
For domestic flights, the number of aircraft departed from I Gusti Ngurah Rai airport in February 2016 was 3,067 flight departures, or fell by 7.15 percent compared to the previous month of 3,303 flight departures.
Moreover, Micky went on, another factor which has affected the growth figure was fuel price decrease which has forced his company to readjust ticket prices.
“Fuel price decrease has resulted in lower ticket prices and it has reduced our revenue compared to previous figure,” Micky said.
Garuda continues to launch various promotional efforts to attract foreigners to travel to Bali in line with the company’s support for the government program of 20 foreign tourist visits by 2019.
“We continue to carry out various efforts to support the government programs also by opening new routes recently and increasing the number of seats for Denpasar-Hong Kong route. The route was previously using 737-800 aircraft with a capacity of 162 seats; we replaced it with A333 aircraft with 251 seats and adding 89 seats,” he explained.
Micky added that Garuda is also mulling on increasing flight frequency of Denpasar-Beijing and Denpasar-Shanghai routes from three flights per week to four or five flights.