Flight delays, baggage handling and poor customer care facilities are the major reasons that upset Indian domestic travelers in 2015.
Flight delays, baggage handling and poor customer care facilities are the major reasons that upset Indian domestic travelers in 2015. Passengers have registered as many as 8,377 complaints against various airlines until September this year.
According to the data issued by DGCA, reasons behind the complaints included flight delays and rescheduling, baggage handling, customer services or staff behavior, refunds and catering.
Almost 21.97 per cent complaints were registered over flight delay and rescheduling of the aircraft. Complaints about customer services in aircraft constituted 19 per cent of the total complaints.
Of the complaints, which were registered with the Directorate General Of Civil Aviation (DGCA), low budget airline SpiceJet topped the list against whom highest number of complaints have been registered this year so far.
Out of the total complaints, around 40 per cent were registered against Spicejet. Go Air stood second with around 20 per cent complaints and 15 per cent complaints were registered against the national carrier Air India, while Jet Airways and Indigo had around six per cent complaints against them.
However, there is some respite for airlines operating in the domestic sector as the number of complaints lodged against them has decreased almost every month till September. While in January the DGCA received 1,197 complaints, in February it was 1,092, March had 1,194, April 935, May 858, June 819, July 802, August 770 and September had 710 complaints.
The overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines for the year 2015 until September was 6.7 per cent. These cancellations were due to reasons of technical snag, operational problems, weather and runway availability. Out of them, technical glitches were behind 24 per cent of cancelled flights this year. Weather was also an important reason for canceling almost 20 per cent flights.
Most cancellation were seen in Jet Airways, where every month almost 3 per cent of flights were cancelled. In SpiceJet 2.5 per cent flights were cancelled, while Air India saw around 2 per cent cancellations every month.
Explaining what is flight delay, Jayant Dasgupta, general manager of Mumbai air traffic control said, “A flight has two types of arrival times. One is real time another one is estimated which is exactly after ten minutes of real time. When a flight is delayed from its estimated time it is addressed as a delay.”
