IndiGo, once the poster child of Indian aviation, is now a case study in how to alienate your own market while still bragging about growth and global ambitions. Behind the glossy investor decks and international expansion plans lies an airline that is canceling flights by the hundreds, bleeding credibility, and treating passengers as an afterthought.
From “On time is a wonderful thing” to a punctuality joke
IndiGo built its brand on punctuality, but that tagline now reads like bitter satire. In 2024, around 69.7 percent of its flights reportedly arrived on time; in the last 12 months, a LocalCircles survey finds 54 percent of IndiGo flyers had an issue with timeliness alone. In November 2025, the airline cancelled 1,232 flights and then capped it with over 200 cancellations on a single day in early December as its on-time performance cratered, plunging on some days to under 20percentage and even to single digits by early December as per government and media data.
The numbers reduce IndiGo’s punctuality promise to a running gag at airport gates. Passengers are stranded for hours, only to discover their “on-time” carrier cannot even tell them if the aircraft or crew exist for their flight.
Passengers as collateral damage
The LocalCircles survey of 15,938 IndiGo flyers across 301 districts is damning not just for what has gone wrong, but how broadly it has deteriorated. In the last 12 months, 54 percent complained about staff attitude and courteousness, 45 percent about information timeliness and transparency, 42 percent about baggage handling, and 32 percent about customer service, with all these figures sharply worse than 2024.
This is not a glitch; it is systemic rot. When over half your passengers say they have a problem with both timeliness and the way your staff behave, you are no longer a low-cost carrier cutting corners—you are a high-friction carrier burning goodwill.
A grounded giant dressed up as a growth story
IndiGo is still adding capacity and touting international ambitions, with weekly flights up 12.7 percent year-on-year and plans to push international ASK share to 40 percent by FY30. Yet behind the growth narrative, the airline slipped into a ₹2,582 crore loss in Q2 FY26, driven by a massive forex hit, even as operational costs, engine issues and crew shortages shredded its once-vaunted reliability.
The result is a Frankenstein balance sheet: scale on paper, chaos on tarmac. IndiGo is effectively trying to run a hyper-ambitious network on a brittle operational spine, and passengers are paying for that mismatch in missed connections, nights spent on terminal floors and holidays wrecked at the boarding gate.
Regulatory heat and safety red flags
While passengers grapple with delays and cancellations, regulators are now probing the airline’s internal discipline. The DGCA has recently fined IndiGo around ₹40 lakh for using unqualified flight simulators to train pilots operating into critical airports like Calicut, Leh and Kathmandu, penalising senior officials for non-compliance with core safety requirements. This comes alongside a DGCA-appointed committee to investigate “deficiencies in internal oversight, operational preparedness, and compliance planning” after the current meltdown, with further sanctions likely once the inquiry concludes.
For an airline that carries over 60 percent of India’s domestic passengers, training lapses and regulator-flagged oversight failures are not minor compliance issues; they are flashing warning lights on the cockpit panel of public trust.
When dominance turns into impunity
The LocalCircles findings show that complaints have risen across almost every operational dimension—timeliness up from 33percentage to 54percentage, baggage issues from 27percentage to 42 percent, staff discourtesy from 46 percent to 54percentage, and information opacity from 27percentage to 45 percent in just one year. Put simply, the bigger IndiGo gets, the worse it seems to treat the people who fill its planes.
With thousands stranded, OTP collapsing into single digits and regulators openly talking of unprecedented action, IndiGo today looks less like a national workhorse and more like a monopoly that mistook market share for a licence to fail. The crisis is not just one bad week—it is the bill coming due for years of stretching operations to the limit while hoping passengers would quietly absorb the turbulence. |
