Business-starved Calcutta lacks business-class passengers to fill its airport lounges, leaving service providers to hedge their bets on the so far untapped business of paid lounge access for low-cost travellers.

IndiGo, SpiceJet and GoAir are working with Travel Food Services, the concessionaire managing F&B services at the city airport, to introduce lounge facilities for their passengers against an optional fee payable with the fare.

The two 100-seater lounges run by Travel Food Services - one each in the domestic and international sections of the integrated terminal - are currently open only to business-class fliers and holders of premium privilege cards such as Priority Pass and gold and platinum memberships of full-service airlines.

On an average, about 400 people avail themselves of domestic lounge facilities daily. "Compared to Delhi and Mumbai or even Bangalore, this is a very small number," an airport official said.

Travel Food Services said paid lounge access would be available in the domestic section by April.

Anyone who opts for the lounge service would get a choice of complimentary food and non-alcoholic beverages, the menu depending on the time of day. Unlike a business-class lounge, alcohol would cost extra.

"We are setting up a separate lounge in the domestic area which low-cost airline passengers can also access. It will have a capacity of 70 seats," Gaurav Dewan, CEO of Travel Food Services, confirmed to Metro.

Clipper Lounge, an old favourite of many, had been used by some low-cost airlines as a stop-gap arrangement until last year, when the Oberoi Group shut it down because the Airports Authority of India didn't renew its contract.

An official of a low-cost airline said paid access to the proposed lounge would be available as a value-added option while booking a seat on a flight. "There will be three parts to the boarding pass of a passenger who buys that service. The third part of the pass can be used to check into the lounge," the airline official explained.

The other metro airports too offer paid lounge access along with lounges for business-class passengers, the difference being that neither is dependent on each other.

"In Calcutta, there are hardly any business-class passengers on domestic flights. So, for the concessionaire too, it makes sense to have a paid lounge for low-cost passengers," an IndiGo official said.

The sprawling integrated terminal opened three years ago, but it hasn't quite become the aviation magnet it had promised to be.

In the domestic sector, Jet Airways and Air India are the only full-service airlines with business-class seats and neither operates as many flights from Calcutta as they do from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

Of the 330-plus domestic flights to and from the city every day, more than 75 per cent are operated by low-cost carriers.

In contrast, Delhi has 900 domestic flights, about 40 per cent of them full-service ones. In Mumbai, which has 780 daily flights, the percentage of full-service domestic airlines is almost the same.

Sources said that on an average, business-class seat occupancy on Jet Airways flights out of Calcutta is between 30 and 35 per cent. The percentage doubles on flights from Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

"For a round trip to Mumbai, a business-class seat costs between Rs 60,000 and Rs 65,000, four times the average economy fare. You need big-ticket corporate travel to sell such expensive seats every day," said Anil Punjabi, chairman (east) of the Travel Agents' Federation of India.