Indigo owns 40% market share

The number of passengers carried by domestic airlines in the current calendar year registered a 17.63% growth compared to the same period in 2016¹.

4.66 crore passengers have taken domestic flights this year, compared to 3.96 crore.

Following a dip between January and February, total domestic passengers consistently grew for the remaining 4 months of the year. May saw a little over 1 crore domestic travelers, the highest this year.

Airline breakdown

Indigo currently holds the largest market share crossing 40% of total passengers up to May, followed by Jet at 17.9% and Air India at 13.3% of total passengers.

Airline traffic saw a similar trend as overall passenger traffic, dipping in February across all airlines before picking up during the remaining months of the year.

Complaints

In the current year, 716 complaints have been registered across various airlines. Despite the largest volume share, Indigo has significantly fewer complaints registered (109, at a complaints/10000 ratio of 0.58) compared to Air India (245, 3.95) and the Jet group (231, 2.77).

Indigo also led in terms of on-time performance, with an OTP of 85% of flights at the four major metros (Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai). SpiceJet is a close second at 82.4% while Air India ranks fourth at 77.8%.

A majority of the delays among the four metro cities seem to have occurred at Mumbai Domestic Airport.

In 2016, baggage earned the largest share of complaints (28%) during the same period, Customer Service took this title in 2017 (27.8%). Refunds saw a good reduction in complaints, down to 2.7% of total complaints compared to 6.2% in 2016. Flight problems, baggage and customer service continue to be the top 3 reasons for complaints by quite a margin.

A total of 2,267 passengers have been denied boarding this year, leading to compensations worth ₹1.37cr. 19,175 passengers experienced flight cancellations (₹55 lakhs) while 91,213 suffered delays (₹89 lakhs).

¹ All data as per data provided by the Ministry of Civil Aviation