Bags packed, tickets checked, you start early and reach the airport in time for your flight. To your dismay, the lady at the check-in counter apologises and says you can’t board the plane. On protesting that you have a confirmed ticket, you are told that the flight has been overbooked. In industry lingo, you have just been ‘bumped off’.
What are the chances of a flier facing this bummer of a situation? Not very high, but quite possible, show statistics from the airline regulator DGCA. In April, 1,016 passengers were denied boarding on flights within India. That may not seem a lot, when juxtaposed with the nearly 63 lakh passengers who took to the domestic skies that month. But in such cases, just a few could be a few too many, especially when you have to travel urgently.
DGCA data shows that Air India and Jet Airways have been denying boarding to a few hundred passengers every month (see table). The other domestic carriers generally don’t seem to deny boarding to passengers, though there have been instances of AirAsia and IndiGo doing so. To our queries, IndiGo responded that as a policy, it does not overbook flights. SpiceJet and Jet Airways acknowledged that they overbook, while Air India and AirAsia did not respond.
17/06/15 Anand Kalyanaraman/Business Line
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What are the chances of a flier facing this bummer of a situation? Not very high, but quite possible, show statistics from the airline regulator DGCA. In April, 1,016 passengers were denied boarding on flights within India. That may not seem a lot, when juxtaposed with the nearly 63 lakh passengers who took to the domestic skies that month. But in such cases, just a few could be a few too many, especially when you have to travel urgently.
DGCA data shows that Air India and Jet Airways have been denying boarding to a few hundred passengers every month (see table). The other domestic carriers generally don’t seem to deny boarding to passengers, though there have been instances of AirAsia and IndiGo doing so. To our queries, IndiGo responded that as a policy, it does not overbook flights. SpiceJet and Jet Airways acknowledged that they overbook, while Air India and AirAsia did not respond.
17/06/15 Anand Kalyanaraman/Business Line
