Starting another round of battle to make its presence felt, Tata Group backed low-cost carrier AirAsia on Sunday announced to offer 3 million promotional seats across AirAsia's network with fares for domestic routes starting from Rs 699 (all inclusive) while for international routes the tickets can be booked starting Rs2,599 (all inclusive). The offer on domestic network is available for travelling from Bengaluru to Chennai/ Kochi/ Goa/ Jaipur/ Chandigarh and vice versa. The officials said the offer is available on international flights from Chennai/ Kochi/ Kolkata/ Tiruchirappalli/ Bengaluru/Hyderabad to Kuala Lumpur operated by AirAsia Berhad and Chennai to Bangkok operated by Thai AirAsia.

The airline officials said the offer whose booking started from 9:30 pm on Sunday will last till November 16 for the travel period? from June 10, 2015 – January 17, 2016. Commenting on the sale, AirAsia India CEO Mittu Chandilya said, "Big Sale will allow our guests to plan travel early with extremely low fares."

In conjunction to the Big Sale promotion, free seats are also up for grabs for AirAsia Berhad flights from Kuala Lumpur to destinations across the airline's extensive network, such as Langkawi, Yogyakarta, Krabi, Siem Reap, Kalibo, Da Nang, Surat Thani, Chengdu, Perth, the airlines official added.

According to industry insiders, the sale by Air Asia is expected to get a competing response from rival airlines. Since the time Air Asia, which is know for its dirt cheap fares announced its venture into the Indian market, there has been several rounds of air fare wars among the airlines in India which have benefited the passengers.

According to the latest data available with global airline body IATA, domestic passenger traffic rose 7.4% in August, which stands second highest growth rate globally after Russia's 10%. However, the low fare war has not gone down well with the apex association of air passengers as Sudhakar Reddy, president of Air Passengers Association of India (APAI) last week wrote to aviation regulator DGCA questioning the frequent 'special fare' offers by domestic carriers and termed them as 'non-existent'. The association urged the DGCA to take action against the malpractices of such airlines. Drawing the attention of DGCA, Reddy, said he has been forced to write to them as most of the times, schemes of low air fares are similar across competing airlines, indicating the possibility of working of a cartel among the airline companies to "fool the public".