Frustration Soars as Flight Cancellations and Poor Service Continue to Trouble Indian Flyers

Everything in India has come to a halt because of the rising demand for air travel. Airlines have failed to manage the extremely high demand, and if that wasn’t enough, cancellation services and customer service help has only worsened the situation. Everything is a mess in India.  

According to a new survey conducted by LocalCircles in April 2023, 61% of Indian travelers faced some sort of cancellation or rescheduling of their flights. Even though this is an improvement from 74% in the prior year, this is still alarming. For the 61% of respondents, they were left to fend for themselves, because no compensatory services were provided by the airlines.  

Things are unchanged now, and they seem to only worsen from here on. An example of this is India's largest airliner IndiGo. Over three years, although 5.47 lakh of its passengers faced cancellations and delays, they were only compensated with a meager sum of ₹18,000 in total. Even worse, since 2024, the airline has also started to operate less and less on time. Surprisingly however, Akasa Air, a relatively new entrant in the aviation market appeared to have an OTP of 74%.

Passengers who opt to cancel their flights are not in for an easy treat as they face penalties ranging from 50-100% of the fare. Unfortunately, we know that there is often no payout for the airlines pulling the plug on travel plans and adding to this 22% of travelers have claimed their refunds are in fact quite difficult to obtain. 

The government has reported a rather alarming statistic concerning flight cancelations over the duration of January 2022 to September 2024. The figure currently sits above 10.76 lakh and covers passengers who have been both stranded and who are still in search of alternative means of transportation. 

So what’s causing this turbulence? Severe weather constitutes about 41.56% of the cancellations along with technical problems or even commercial decisions. The later is something that many airlines could have more effectively planned ahead for. 

It shouldn't come as super surprising either that IndiGo seems to account for well over 60% of cancelations, a whopping 15,464, during the first half of 2024. In addition to them it appears that other large offenders were Alliance Air (2,707 cancellations), Air India (1,934), and SpiceJet (1,731), as reported by Civil Aviation Minister Murlidhar Mohol in the Rajya Sabha. 

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