Nearly 500,000 passengers affected due to flight delays in Jan 2024: DGCA

A whopping 482,000 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 per cent in January to 13.1 million 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 refund 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 per cent or 7,909,000 passengers, followed by Air India with a 12.2 per cent market share at 1,597,000 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 per cent of these complaints were related to flight problem, while 17.8 per cent were on account of refund, as per the DGCA data.

Besides, 10.4 per cent of the complaints were lodged due to baggage-related issues and another 4.7 per cent 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 per cent of its flights on average arriving and departing on time.