Mumbai: A whopping 4.82 lakh passengers were affected due to delayed flights (beyond two hours) in January this year, forcing the airlines to shell out Rs 3.69 crore towards facilitation, according to the DGCA monthly traffic data released on Thursday. At the same time, domestic passenger traffic grew 4.69 percent in January to 1.31 crore over the same month of last year, according to the DGCA.
The domestic passenger traffic for January 2023 was recorded at 1.25 crore. In addition to delays, some 1,374 passengers were denied boarding in the previous month by the various airlines, resulting in a spend of Rs 1.28 crore in compensation other than providing alternate flights and accommodation, refreshments, and meals, according to data. In addition to this, the airlines also coughed up Rs 1.43 crore, along with offering refunds and re-bookings to the 68,362 passengers whose flights were cancelled during the month, as per the DGCA data.
On the domestic passenger traffic front, no-frills carrier IndiGo accounted for 60.2 percent or 79.09 lakh passengers, followed by Air India with a 12.2 percent market share at 15.97 lakh passengers during the month. During January 2024, a total of 732 passenger-related complaints had been received by the scheduled domestic airlines. The number of complaints per 10,000 passengers carried for January 2024 was around 0.56 owing to various reasons.
As much as 54.8 percent of these complaints were related to flight problems, while 17.8 percent were on account of refunds, as per the DGCA data. Besides, 10.4 percent of the complaints were lodged due to baggage-related issues and another 4.7 percent over staff behaviour, the data showed. Akasa Air, which started operations on August 2022, delivered the highest on-time performance from the four key metro airports -- Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad -- with as much as 71.8 percent of its flights on average arriving and departing on time.
