779 passengers denied boarding by airlines in May: DGCA

Shubhadeep Choudhury                                                                                         

New Delhi, June 22

Seven hundred and seventy-nine passengers were denied boarding by airlines during the past month, the Air Traffic Report for May 2022 released by Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Wednesday stated.

Topping the list is SpiceJet which denied boarding to 498 passengers. The airlines spent Rs 7.35 lakh on account of refreshments an alternative flights for these passengers who were denied boarding at a particular flight despite having valid tickets.

Next to Spice Jet, Air India occupies the second position when it comes to denial of boarding to passengers. It denied boarding to 127 passengers in May and spent Rs 1.22 lakh on account of their accommodation, refreshments and alternate flights.  

The report stated that a total of  34,862 passengers were affected by cancellation of flights by domestic airlines during May and Rs 78.60 lakh was spent on account of giving compensations to them.

Passengers totaling 1,24,250 were affected by flight delays of over two hours and over Rs 2.31 crore were spent by airlines on account of their facilitation. Maximum amount — over Rs 1 crore —- was spent by SpiceJet as 46,668 passengers travelling by the airline were affected by flight delays during May.

The report noted that majority of cases of delays were attributed to “reactionary” (delay caused by late arrival of aircraft, crew, passengers or baggage from previous journeys).

During May 2022, a total of 554 passenger related complaints were received by the domestic airlines. Maximum number of complaints were received by Alliance Air (200), followed by Air India (160), SpiceJet (97), Indigo (50) and so on.  

The major reasons for complaints were flight problem (40.4 per cent),  refund (18.1 per cent), customer service (13.7 per cent), baggage (12.6 per cent), etc.

Indigo continued to maintain its leadership position with more than half of the market share. IndiGo’s market share was 57.9 per cent in May.

Domestic air passenger traffic jumped to 1.2 crore in May 2022, marking an increase of 11 percent over the preceding month. The figure suggests that air traffic has been inching closer to the pre-pandemic level. Domestic airlines had cumulatively ferried a total of 1.22 crore passengers in May 2019.