Etihad Airways is focusing on corporate and premium leisure segments to drive growth in India, Chief Executive Officer Antonoaldo Neves said.

While the focus in the past two years was on improving schedules and increasing capacity, the airline is now planning to introduce it’s latest product on Indian routes and expand corporate contracts.

“We are increasing emphasis on corporate business. We have invested a lot in our business class product. Equally the focus is on premium leisure traffic from Europe/US to India and vice versa,” Neves said. He added around 60 per cent of seats on India-UAE routes are sold outside India.

Etihad Airways introduced it’s new Airbus A321LR aircraft with private suites and lie-flat business class seats on the Kolkata route in September. Neves said A321LR will be deployed to more Indian destinations.

Load factors

The Abu-Dhabi airline flies 183 weekly flights to 11 cities in India. “Indian market is performing very well for us. Our load factors in premium cabin are around 25 per cent higher compared to last year,” Neves said and the airline contributed to around 10 per cent of India’s international traffic growth in 2025.

“Our competition has more flights between India and Abu Dhabi than us. It is working very well for India. Indian nationals are number one tourists in Abu Dhabi. We are also very happy about the number of tourists we are bringing to India,” he said.

Overall capacity on India-West Asia routes is up by 1.3 per cent on a year-on-year basis. But Abu Dhabi has seen faster growth with 13.6 per cent increase in flights, data from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows.

India-Abu Dhabi air services agreement allows airlines from both sides to deploy 50,000 seats per week. UAE carriers have fully utilised the entitlement and will need fresh quota to add flights to India.

Neves said Etihad would like to have more capacity to India to enable it to expand operations. “There is space for every one and pie will only grow,” Neves said pointing to India’s GDP growth, rising income and diaspora contributing to traffic growth.

Published on October 15, 2025