When you cancel your flight ticket, you may lose half to as much as the full ticket fare. But when the airline cancels your flight, what do you get? Nothing.
In fact, 22 per cent of Indian passengers say they struggled to get even a refund. Doesn’t sound fair, does it? This is increasingly becoming an issue, with more than 6 out of 10 airline passengers in India saying they have faced one or more flight cancellations in the past one year. While most of these are due to internal airline reasons, the passengers say they lose 50 to 100 per cent in penalties, while when the airline cancels a flight, there is no penalty offered.
Respondents of a LocalCircles survey unveiled on Wednesday morning said they received no compensation — while the majority got their refund in a timely manner, many did not even get there. While they were either re-booked on an alternate flight within 24 hours, some just got a refund of the ticket fare at a later date.
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With flight cancellations getting more common as more and more flights operate in the booming Indian domestic sector — India is the world’s third biggest aviation market and the fastest growing right now, this is increasingly a matter for regulators to look into.
According to government data, over 25,000 flights were cancelled between January 2022 and September 2024, more than 40 per cent of them due to weather conditions. With more and more Indians travelling by air, this means it affects more and more individuals, travel plans and business workings.
For example, according to Minister of State for Civil Aviation Murlidhar Mohol, these cancellations between 2022 and 2024 affected nearly 11 lakh passengers.
The civil aviation ministry had last year issued orders that “a flight has to be cancelled if the delay is exceeding three hours." In the first eleven months of last year, one in every three domestic flights was delayed, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation. This marked a stark deterioration from 2023, when only 22 per cent of flights by the country’s top six airlines faced delays during the same period.
