IndiGo back on its feet; operations stable, says CEO Peter Elbers

Crisis-ridden IndiGo on Tuesday claimed that the airline is back on its feet and operations are stable, even as it keeps addressing all customer needs.

In the latest video message, IndiGo CEO Peter Elbers also said that lakhs of customers, whose flights were cancelled or delayed, have already received their full refunds, and the process is ongoing on a daily basis.

Elbers, however, remained tight-lipped on the compensation to customers, whose flights were cancelled at the last minute or were hugely delayed.

As per the Civil Aviation Ministry's passenger charter, if an airline fails to inform a passenger of his/her flight cancellation at least two weeks before departure, compensation is legally mandatory, and its amount depends on the flight duration.

Also, the airline has to provide compensation automatically, without passengers asking for it.

"IndiGo is back on its feet, and our operations are stable. We've let you down when a major operational disruption happened, and we're sorry for that," Elbers said in a video message on Tuesday.

"Earlier, we had indicated to normalise between December 10-15. I can confirm now that today, as of December 9, our operations are fully stabilised, which means flights reflecting on our website are scheduled to operate with an adjusted network," he added.

Acknowledging that the people, whose flights were abruptly cancelled or delayed, were travelling for various reasons, he said, "Thousands of you could not travel, and we are profusely apologetic about that".

Initially, the airline's first priority was to get "all stranded and delayed customers safely" to their destinations or back home, Elbers said, adding that "then we started our refunds".

Lakhs of customers have already received their full refunds, and the airline continues to do so on a daily basis, he said without giving any specific amount that IndiGo has released so far.

"Most of the bags stuck at airports have already been delivered back to your homes, and our teams are working very hard on delivering the remaining ones very soon. And we also continue to address all customer needs," Elbers said.

He said that the restoration of IndiGo's network and flights was being done on a "war footing".

"On December 5, we could only fly 700 flights. Thereafter, gradually yet steadily improving to 1,500 on December 6, 1,650 on December 7, 1,800 on Monday and Tuesday, more than 1,800," the CEO said.

As of Monday, the airline was flying back to all its 138 destinations in its network, he said, adding that IndiGo's on-time performance was also back to normal.