New Delhi: The IndiGo, the largest airline in India, is experiencing a very trying moment following the cancellation of many of its flights within the nation. During the first week of December, the major airports experienced severe inconveniences because flights were cancelled or delayed. Due to such massive disturbance, IndiGo has estimated having to pay over 500 crore compensation and refund to affected passengers.
The issue began during the first week of December and lasted many days. In the period, hundreds of IndiGo flights failed to run as scheduled. Repeat cancellations were witnessed in airports such as Delhi, Bengaluru, Coimbatore and Chandigarh. Most passengers arrived at the airport just to realize that their flights were cancelled at the last minute. Others had been stranded in hours, and others had to postpone crucial visits, family affairs or even business meetings.
IndiGo has indicated that the customers who have had flights canceled less than 24 hours of the flight will be refunded in line with the aviation regulations. The airline is also offering a refund to those passengers who opted not to travel their money back. The airline stated that the majority of refunds have been already fulfilled and the rest of the refund cases would be fulfilled within the next few weeks. Other passengers who will be caught along in the initial few weeks of the disruption will be contacted later in order to get the right compensation.
The poor planning and management issues have been mentioned by aviation officials as the primary cause of this mess. The issues of crew scheduling and flight operations resulted in the situation when the planes and the staff were not always available at the time. These problems caused flights not to leave on time, which resulted in a domino effect of cancellations in most airports.
The aviation regulator in India took it seriously and raised issues concerning the way the airline managed the situation. According to the officials, improved planning and enhanced systems were required in order to prevent such mass disruption in future. It was also evident that the government insisted that passenger comfort and safety must always be the first priority particularly to a large airline with lakhs of passengers on a daily basis.
Cancellations were reported even on the December 13 when the situation was better than on the previous days. In Coimbatore airport, a handful of flights to other cities such as Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad were cancelled. The cancellations also occurred in destinations to major cities at Chandigarh airport. But there was generally normal operation in the airports such as Delhi where passengers were urged to check the status of the flights due to the weather of winter and low visibility.
IndiGo claimed that it has since commenced stabilizing its operations. The airline minimised its number of flights per day in the short run to ensure that the airline was in a position to coordinate schedules and prevent last minute cancellations. During one of the recovery days, the airline had over 2,000 flights rendering that services were gradually resuming normalcy.
The airline also promised the passengers that it is trying to enhance the communication and support. The deployment of special teams was made to assist stranded passengers in the airports and customer care teams were instructed to accelerate the refunds and other rebooking requests. IndiGo has indicated that it realizes how frustrating the inconvenience can be to the passengers.
