Rahul Bhatia

IndiGo is a private, low-cost airline based in Gurgaon, Haryana, India.[1] Since commencing operations in August 2006, it has established itself as one of India's leading airlines using its model of efficient, low-cost operations and by attracting customers with low fares.

Story:

IndiGo was founded by Rakesh Gangwal and Rahul Bhatia. The parent company of the airline is Gurgaon-based InterGlobe Enterprises.[2] It took delivery of its first Airbus A320-200 aircraft on 28 July 2006 and commenced operations on 4 August 2006 with a service from New Delhi to Imphal via Guwahati. By the end of 2006, the airline had six aircraft. Nine more aircraft were acquired in 2007 taking the total to 15.

Former US Airways Executive vice-President and Marketing and Planning Bruce Ashby joined IndiGo as its Chief Executive Officer. The airline has also acquired three parking spots in Indira Gandhi International Airport and Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport

Rahul Bhatia

InterGlobe Enterprises Limited“Complacency, in many ways, is the beginning of the end.”

Mr. Rahul Bhatia is the Group Managing Director of InterGlobe Enterprises. He laid the foundation for the enterprise in 1989 with its flagship business of Air Transport Management. It is under his able captainship that the enterprise has diversified manifold and is a preferred and trusted partner today for leading travel and technology companies globally.

Owing to his penchant for developing and assimilating new technologies of tomorrow, Mr. Bhatia has led the development of a number of new businesses in the travel domain and continues to oversee recent diversification into aviation and hospitality.

http://www.ey.com/IN/en/About-us/Entrepreneur-Of-The-Year/EOY-2010-India-winners--- Videos - videooo is guuuddddd

Rahul Bhatia: Cheap Seats and Profits

The reticent captain of IndiGo knows how to keep his business on course.

RAHUL BHATIA

HE IS IndiGo Airline's promoter

TRAJECTORY SO FAR : A surprise entrant into the low cost carrier business (in 2006), IndiGo is

now India's largest LCC, a profit-making one at that

NEXT STOP: Develop a chain of three-star hotels. "The future is in this market and all the figures

point to it," says Bhatia

Every travel agent dreams of starting an airline, says Rajji Rai, President of the Travel Agents

Association of India, India's leading travel agents body. "Only two who started in the travel agency

business, Rahul Bhatia and Naresh Goyal, have actually succeeded," he adds.

Even if Goyal's star has lost some of its twinkle in recent years, Bhatia's seems to be on the

ascendant. His airline IndiGo is now the most profitable in the country.

Not much was known about its profitability, as the company is not obliged to make its numbers

known. Civil aviation minister Praful Patel revealed some of the financials this November in a reply to

a parliamentary question. Low cost carrier (LCC) IndiGo and the much smaller regional carrier

Paramount were the only two airlines in India that had made a profit in 2008-2009. IndiGo made Rs.

82 crore, while Paramount notched up Rs. 7 crore.

Running an airline today is more excruciating than getting a root canal without anesthesia. Bhatia

stands among the few who are not flinching. Rai, whose office at Connaught Place in New Delhi was

right next to Bhatia's in the early days, counts himself among Bhatia's friends from that time. "He has

done astronomically well," says Rai.

In a business meant for the big boys Bhatia has surprised everyone. Though the last of the

networked carriers to take off in 2006, IndiGo is now India's largest LCC. Its offering focussed on a

fresh-clean product, a decent on-time performance and fabulous sandwiches, has attracted a faithful

following. Now nobody knows how this has happened and Bhatia isn't helping. He says he doesn't

think that way. Probe harder and all you get is: "Honesty of purpose which comes from my parents,

luck and destiny." Bhatia is very reticent and this allows him to move unnoticed and surprise people.

At the Paris air show in the summer of 2005, all manner of aircraft from the mammoth A380 to the

Su 27 were showing off in the air. A line-up of sheikhs, ministers and generals were signing millions

of dollars worth of deals amidst champagne and handshakes. Showmanship was the leitmotif as

airlines and vendors pulled out all PR stops to outdo each other. An unexpected development that

created ripples that year, was a $6 billion order for 100 planes by an Indian travel technology firm

called InterGlobe Enterprises. The order was for its airline venture called IndiGo that had not even

been launched. Everyone scrambled to find who was taking such a big bet.

They needn't have bothered. The InterGlobe promoter and managing director Rahul Bhatia, had

given the event a miss.

Actually, Interglobe's forerunner Delhi Express, a small airline representation firm is a good place to

start with to understand Bhatia. Kapil Bhatia, Rahul's father, started Delhi Express with a partner. It

was a well-run airline representation firm, but remained small. After Rahul Bhatia returned from

Canada with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ontario and a two-year stint

with IBM, he decided to scale up operations and started InterGlobe Enterprises. He recognized the

huge opportunities opening up beyond the traditional general sales agent (GSA) business of selling

tickets.

Over the next 15 years, he displayed an astute sense in picking the best partnerships with

companies from around the world and brought them into his Indian ventures. In most cases the

partners have invested in the business with him. On the technology side, he first tied up with New

York-based Cendant for a stake in InterGlobe Technologies. In the airline business, he roped in

former U.S. Airways CEO Rakesh Gangwal as a partner. The hotel business is a joint venture with

French hospitality group Accor and for the business jet venture he picked American corporate jet

maker Hawker-Beechcraft.

Bhatia scripted each move through the dint of hard work, turning into a road-warrior, putting in 18-

hour days and hitting the road sometimes for more than 15 days a month. Rai remembers pinning

down Bhatia for meetings at Brusells airport on one occasion and London Heathrow on another, as

he flew in and out of the cities. He was rarely in office, but had acquired the reputation of a crack

negotiator, jet-setting all over the world to sew up the best deals.

"He inherited the goodwill of his dad's business and built on it successfully", says Seema Luthra,

who was president and chief executive officer of Galileo and worked with Bhatia for two decades.

She quit InterGlobe two years ago to start her own entrepreneurial venture. Bhatia also showed that

he could take the longview needed to build an organization.

In 2001, Luthra was heading sales and marketing for United Airlines on behalf of Interglobe Air

Transport (IGAT), an offshoring company that catered to large international airlines from India. After

9/11, United Airlines, one of the largest clients of InterGlobe announced it was stopping flights to

India on security concerns. This dealt the Indian company a body blow. Massive investments had

been made for the United Airlines operations in India and business was roaring. When overnight

revenues started dropping, there was tremendous insecurity among employees, recalls Luthra.

"Rahul invited me home for dinner to thank the team for the efforts and to reassure everyone that

they will be protected. Despite a very difficult period financially, he never let go of a single

employee," she says.

During leadership meetings, he often spoke of the number of families that depend on InterGlobe and

how decisions need to be taken keeping them in mind. "In my 20 years," she says, "I do not recall a

single year, including the bad years, that the employees were not paid their annual bonus."

He is also a very patient man. He always wanted to start an airline but waited for pioneers like Air

Deccan and Jet Airways to develop the market. He also waited for Rakesh Gangwal, who after a

successful career with United, U.S. Airways, Air France and Worldspan, advises the private equity

arm of a $100 billion Canadian pension fund. Much before IndiGo was launched, he had told friends,

if he were ever to get into the business, it would be with Gangwal. The reason could be that

Gangwal has an enviable global network and counts people like the Airbus CEO John Leahy among

his closest friends.

Bhatia did the hard yards to earn Gangwal's trust. He first represented the United Airlines when

Gangwal was a senior official there. Later, he catered to United's needs by operating as a BPO. His

efforts paid off when Gangwal invested in Bhatia's IndiGo. "This is one excellent example of how

Rahul is able to build on relationships," says a former senior manager at InterGlobe.

And he went about building IndiGo methodically. Pramod Sahni, director CRM Global, who worked

for Bhatia for close to 20 years, has many stories to tell about Bhatia's search for the right talent.

"While building Indigo, he would insist on interviewing candidates at every level. From check-in

counter people, to crew, sales and marketing staff, they were all hired only after Rahul had met

them." Sahni remembers flying with him to three cities in a day to meet candidates. On one such day

we flew from Delhi to Hyderabad to Chennai to Mumbai, interviewing people everywhere, he says. A

sad fallout of all the travel for Bhatia is a back problem that troubles him now.

The positive from those days of endless travel is that he is a bit of an expert on food. "Name any city

in the world and he will tell you the best places to eat and even offer to make you a reservation,"

says Sahni, who has dined with Bhatia at restaurants around the world. Bhatia, with his gourmet

friends, owns two award-winning restaurants -- China Club in Gurgaon and Piccadeli in New Delhi.

"The fact that IndiGo serves the best sandwiches in the sky does not come as a surprise to me,"

says Luthra.

And now his love of food is being extended to the hospitality business. This is through a 60-40 hotel

joint venture with the French hotel group Accor, to develop a chain of three star hotels under the Ibis

brand. The second of 14 such hotels has just opened up in Pune. "The future is in this market and all

the figures point to it," says Bhatia.

But for the moment, the mountains of Whistler in British Columbia, Canada, his favorite holiday

destination, beckon and heis heading there for a winter break.

Interview

Rahul Bhatia, Managing Director, IndiGo

MINT sourced by HT Media Ltd / 16:10 , Apr 19, 2011

Indian low-cost carrier IndiGo hit the headlines when it ordered 180 Airbus A320 aircraft in January. By then, the company had already established itself in the Indian airline market with its distinctive and on-time low-cost service. Its managing director Rahul Bhatia, however continues to remain low-profile. In an all-too-rare media interaction on the sidelines of InterGlobe's brand relaunch, Bhatia, who also runs restaurants, talked about the group's future, IndiGo's expansion, business failures and how he overcame stiff resistance from his father, a veteran in the travel business, to set up the airline. Edited excerpts:

What would you define as the cornerstones of your expansion after you returned to join your family business of travel in InterGlobe from studies at University of Waterloo?If you go back to when I came home, which was in mid-1984, at that time I had an arrangement with a company, which is known as Nortel (Networks Inc.) to actually set up a manufacturing plant here to manufacture digital telephone switches. Then the late Mrs (Indira) Gandhi took a view that India was going to develop indigenous technology and use CDoT (Centre for Development of Telematics) as vehicle to do that. So that whole project did not see the light of the day. And I was disheartened and sort of languished for two-three years. At one time, I thought I should go back and maybe do a PhD and teach. Part of the attraction was that when you teach you are kind of your own man, find your own life, you get time off.... Then my father became unwell, I think in 1988, and that was a sort of turning point and that's where the journey started.

What will InterGlobe look like, 10 years from now? Going forward, there are three businesses which we think are going to grow significantly. InterGlobe Hotels, a relationship with Accor (Hotels); we believe this will assume a leadership role in lodging business in the country.

IndiGo-everybody knows where we are today and where we are going to be in few years and we recently announced a new order which I think has visibility for the airline till 2020. And then we have InterGlobe Technologies which is really an IT service and BPO (business process outsourcing) operation and we think is a business which will continue to offer a fairly attractive cost arbitrage for the same period of time. We certainly want to grow that business. Of course there would be organic growth and one or two (cases of) inorganic growth to take us to a different scale. And there are some other things on the drawing board; for reasons of confidentiality I will not say much. These will unfold as they do.

What domain will these be in? They probably will end up being in a domain that is not core to us today.

From running a 20-aircraft airline to now 39 and then 50 is an entirely different ball game in terms of complexity and scale. How are you planning to manage the transition? If IndiGo were to grow from the current fleet (of) 39 (aircraft) to a very different number in the future, the airline's mission will be to continue to deliver just three things-fly on time, keep planes neat and clean and deliver a certain level of service that people have come to recognize us for. Without adding any complexities to those deliverables, just hanging on to those deliverables, but delivering them at a different scale-that in itself is an exponential challenge. But we cannot absolutely afford to miss a heartbeat on those core deliverables.

With all things being same, and the three things you said, what is the competitive advantage IndiGo will have?

It will always be our people and the three things.

How do you see the airline industry shaping up over the next few years in India? I think that at a macro level India is going to continue to grow and there is enough room for many of us to survive, and survive well. I think we are just at the front end of huge growth that you will see in aviation in India over the next 20 years.

The low-cost airlines and full service airlines are both here to stay. How do you see their share of the pie evolving? I think it's very important for us to just keep our head down and just keep flying away and implementing what we have set out to achieve. Who is to say how the industry will look like in five years? I mean, could any one of us have thought of industry being what it is today 10 years ago? Absolutely not. We all recognize there is enormous growth out there. And some of us will embrace that growth profitably, others will not. Time will tell.

Do you see IndiGo growing to be like Southwest Airlines, with a focus on one particular region? The heart of IndiGo will always remain India. There is so much growth here. We will always be a company that is enormously focused on India and possibly the neighbouring regions.

What about going Europe or US or touching points in Europe where your A320s can fly to? I don't think so. Jet Airways' Naresh Goyal and your father (and you too) were good friends and both started from travel agencies. You moved on from there to a place where you are now rivals.

How did the relationship change? I don't think we are rivals. I mean Naresh runs an extraordinary airline. It's a full service airline, it's meant (for) a certain segment of the market; he flies long haul, he has a different mode. We are the guys who scrape the (bottom of the) barrel. We are trying to move people from rail and road transport on to planes. So it's a very different model. So there is no rivalry at all.

Would you say it was a big help to have known how to the run the chain from the ground up unlike many who have no understanding of the business? Quite clearly, when you look at Rakesh (Gangwal) as the co-founder, I think his understanding of airlines and operating airlines and working with manufactures is a enormous value ad we have. Now, I got to know Rakesh because we were in the airline services business. InterGlobe had a relationship with US Airways Inc. (of which Gangwal was CEO) and we managed his GSA (general sales agent) for many years. So there are some benefits.

IndiGo has hired bankers for a possible initial public offering; will it be the first listed firm in the privately run group? I wish I could give you a clear answer. I just don't know. There are so many moving thoughts. We look at this thing on a quarterly basis and see what we want to do, what we don't want to do. It's like anything else. You look at all sorts of things. Recently we took a cluster of four hotels that were co-owned by us and Accor and we brought in a third party from the US as a equity partner.

You are not looking at any funding for the group this fiscal? I don't think so.

Do you think the government should continue to bail out airlines and will you also seek a bailout yourself? That's the government's prerogative. I don't think we have reached out to do anything like this. We don't foresee that sort of a situation.