Flying Dutchman Elbers propels IndiGo to new heights

IndiGo is “in a hurry” is one of the favourite phrases used by Pieter Elbers to describe India’s rampant airline.

This carrier, which is only 18 years old, is on a mission to make air travel affordable as a realistic alternative to the country’s huge rail network and is busily growing from its domestic roots into an increasingly boisterous international player.

The man tasked with delivering IndiGo to new heights and tackle new frontiers is Pieter Elbers, the live wire former leader of KLM who was appointed by Rahul Bhatia, the Group Managing Director of InterGlobe Enterprises, IndiGo’s parent company, in September 2022.

As Elbers nears the end of his third year at the helm, in an interview with Aviation Week, he reflected on his time in India so far, and why the opportunity to lead IndiGo came at a good time for him.

His journey at KLM started at the age of 22 in airport handling at Amsterdam Schiphol before moving to KLM outposts around the world. “I made my classic way through the company and became CEO in 2014,” he said. It was a swift rise for the highly regarded Elbers, who was just 44 when he took the reins at KLM.

The Dutch flag carrier, which merged with Air France in 2004, and celebrated its centenary in 2019, was in good shape and well managed.

It would have been easy for Elbers to see out his career in Europe. But he was not ready to settle for that: “I was 52 and still had a lot of energy, and I want to contribute to the industry.”

Elbers was navigating KLM out of the Covid crisis when Rahul Bhatia approached him. On a personal level he felt ready for a new challenge, and as Bhatia explained the IndiGo story Elbers was captivated.

“This is India's time was [the theme] emerging from that conversation. His words were ‘I know the opportunity. The only thing is, I don't know how large it is,” Elbers recalled. “And I think to some extent, no one exactly knows.

“Of course, it's a business journey, but it's also a journey where I am proud to make a modest contribution to the growth of this nation,” he said. “It is not my country of birth, but I’ve lived here three years now. I feel strongly associated and embedded here and India has been extremely hospitable and welcoming to me.”

As demonstrated by his high-energy performance during the IATA AGM, Elbers has thrown himself not only into taking IndiGo to the next level but also embracing everything Indian he can at the same time.

That has included taking to the holy waters alongside thousands of devotees at the Maha Kumbh spiritual gathering in Prayagraj, northern India, earlier this year.

He has also adopted the sleeveless Nehru jacket, a hip-length tailored coat favoured by Indian businesspeople, made famous by India’s Prime Minister Jawaharial Nehru in the 1950s.

Naturally, the jackets Elbers sports are in IndiGo’s blue colours with a discrete airline logo as well.

He will not be drawn on how he chose this Indian look, but it appears a smart choice, helping to bond a western expatriate into India’s demanding business environment.

While the jacket is merely a symbol it is part of a process over the past three years that has seen Elbers winning over IndiGo’s staff, which number over 60,000 today, brought him a high-profile in the Indian media, and helped forge close ties with the country’s government and regulators.

International drive

Symbolism aside, from the outset the task before Elbers was to take a successful domestic low-cost player and accelerate an already rapid growth pace.

More significantly, while it had been making decent inroads into international markets close to India for a decade, the challenge presented to Elbers was to power up IndiGo’s charge into longer-haul markets.

The platform was there, and the numbers are impressive, proving that IndiGo has emerged more powerful than ever from the pandemic. It carried 118 million passengers in its fiscal year to the end of March 2025, topped $10 billion in annual revenue, and operates 2,300 flights daily to over 130 destinations with a fleet of 430 aircraft.

Significantly, in May, IndiGo was assigned an investment grade rating by Moody’s Ratings, with the body stating: “IndiGo's Baa3 rating reflects its dominant market position in India's domestic airline sector, cost competitive operations, strong financial metrics and excellent liquidity.”

The carrier is riding high on India’s strong growth story as it enters its fourth industrial revolution, with the country becoming the globe’s third largest economy, with the world’s youngest population and an expanding middle class, explained Elbers in a press briefing in advance of the IATA Annual General Meeting.

The Indian air travel market is growing at double-digit rates as a three-hour flight becomes price competitive with lengthy train journeys. “With the growth of the nation where time becomes more precious, that's exactly where we see millions and millions of first-time flyers,” explained Elbers.

When he arrived the early discussions with IndiGo’s board and Rahul Bhatia examined how fast to push internationally. “There’s a view that India deserves and should have airlines which are matching the potential and the size and the opportunity of the country,” recalled Elbers.

“For a long time, India, for a whole host of reasons, did not have it,” he noted. “The opportunity now is to start making it and then to shape it. That was the framework of joining.”

In 2022, the direction of travel had been set but an exact timeline to add widebody aircraft and go long-haul had not, said Elbers.

However, “one of the first things I did was push the throttle on further internationalisation, and that clearly was part of the journey,” he said.

When he joined IndiGo had 20 international routes. It is up to 41 today and will reach 51 by the end of 2026, including the launch of services in July to Manchester and Amsterdam operated with Boeing 787-9s being leased from Norse Atlantic Airways.

“We are shaping the future as we go along with the overriding objective that India should have airlines, for sure Indigo being one of them, matching the size of the country,” he said.

Going long-haul

In April 2024, less than two years since Elbers arrived, IndiGo took a massive step towards becoming a global aviation player with its order for 30 Airbus A350-900s. Its first widebody from this order is scheduled to arrive in 2027.

Adding widebodies takes IndiGo into another dimension on every front, from the investment required to the ability to sell tickets outside India. Some commentators ask why change the successful, single-fleet, low-cost model. Others say it is not coming fast enough.

“Every time we take a step, I carefully evaluate what is the first response to that step, how does it work and how does it fit in,” explained Elbers.

During his presentations to media at the AGM he stresses how IndiGo has for a long time been “building its own unique model” while “maintaining cost leadership”.

His irritation at media questions about whether IndiGo is still a low-cost carrier is apparent. He answers them all the time. For him, IndiGo has moved on. The carrier’s business model can no longer be that simple as it branches out in multiple directions.

Elbers points to IndiGo operating at primary airports, codeshares, cargo, high frequencies and connections, corporate fares, hotels and its venture capital arm as examples of it paving its own path.

Also, India has moved on. “I think you should always look to the situation. There are the airlines, there’s the context you operate in and there’s a competitive field you operate in,” he noted.

Regions such as Europe, the US and China have seen a handful of larger operators come to dominate the market.

“Some of the consolidation which has taken place or is still taking place in Europe has pretty much taken place already in India,” he said. “The two large players which are emerging are Indigo and the Air India Group.”

“It's an evolution of our model. We have chosen to take part in the growth of the Indian market,” he explained.

At IndiGo, the challenge is balancing the expensive task of going long-haul while keeping its costs in check. Elbers acknowledged the focus to “keep the basis of our cost leadership on the domestic network. India is an incredibly price sensitive market, and that's exactly why people who lose focus on cost leadership become an issue.

“[We ask] is a trade-off scalable whenever we add something? And can it be scalable enough to address our costs?” he noted.

Whether it is the decision to order the A350 or to introduce its Stretch business class product on Indian metropolitan city routes, he is asked are these moves too early or too late. For Elbers, that is not the way to look at them.

“The question is, how do these different building blocks add to the overall view of where India is heading and where IndiGo is heading,” he said.

As IndiGo charts its course, in a country as large and complex as India, there are bound to be bumps in the road. The decision of India’s civil aviation regulator to withdraw approval of IndiGo’s partnership with Turkish Airlines, where it operates a pair of that carrier’s 777s between Istanbul and Delhi and Mumbai, is a blow.

This a fall out from the hostilities between India and Pakistan which took place in early May and India’s dim view of support provided by Turkey to Pakistan.

IndiGo’s first venture into widebody aircraft may come early but it has learnt valuable lessons from the experience, and it will find a way a fill the void.

Of greater recent concern is the fatal accident of Air India flight AI171 which crashed on take-off at Ahmedebad Airport just two weeks after the IATA AGM.

Airline leaders, including Elbers, have expressed their deep shock and sadness. “The entire IndiGo family stands in solidarity and united in spirit with our colleagues at Air India in this very difficult time,” he stated in a Linked In post.

It is a tragic reminder that running airlines, while one of the safest modes of transport on the planet, is never straightforward.

Talking prior to AI171 crash about the move into long-haul, Elbers told Aviation Week that the big picture is rarely clear when decisions about aircraft orders or a new business direction are taken.

“There are a couple of dynamics in the rest of the world which you cannot exactly foresee. At that time, we didn't know about this entire tariff discussion or the geopolitical framework,” he said.

Despite the uncertainties the world throws up, Elbers said IndiGo’s path ahead is clear. “We keep that flexibility [to alter the plan],” he explained. “But if you look to the key statistics and ambitions of the country that then it's all pointing in one direction.”

It is a vision backed at the highest level in the Indian government. “The speech of the honourable Prime Minister [Narendra Modi spoke at the AGM] was a confirmation of that direction and underlined the importance of aviation,” said Elbers.

“That is the context in which we operate, and the context we had in mind when I joined.”

Under Elbers, IndiGo will remain vigilant and adapt as the world changes, but the course is set as it strives to becoming a true rival to privatised Air India and overseas operators on long-haul markets.