DGCA has come down hard on Airliners following the recent incident where one of the private airliner charged exorbitant “Rs. 35k” airfare charge for a journey from Mumbai to Delhi. When this news was spread across the media, who made lot of hue and cry about it – DGCA intervened and put a rap on operators.
They came up with following guidelines last month:
- Declaring their fares publically on websites and newspapers
- Informing of any change in the prices within 24 hours of changing them
- Furnish a copy of the route wise tariff to the DGCA on the 1st of every month
I was quite sceptical on whether these guidelines will ever be met – But to my surprise, all airlines have swiftly taken action. 7th December was the last date to declare the fares publicly and they seem to have done so without any delays.
All operators, namely Air India Ltd, GoAir, IndiGo, Jet Airways, JetLite, Kingfisher Airlines, Paramount Airways and SpiceJet, all members of the Federation of Indian Airlines, have published different fare levels for each route operated on their Web sites yesterday.
Just out of curiosity, I visited 3-4 websites of different Airliners, and all of them had detailed information of air-fares on all the routes.
Here are few links.
- Indigo Air Fare Sheet
- Spicejet Airfare Sheet
- Jet Airways Airfare Sheet (All)
- GoAir AirFare Sheet
Now, one thing is for sure – Operators will surely be wary of increasing the the airfares at will. So, henceforth, if you ever find that a particular route is getting charged more than normal, make sure you check their Airfare sheet to see if the fares are in line with what has been published!
The intension was good but unless the solution is useful to the end user (ordinary people) it will have no effect.
When some one decides to fly they check prices of each airline for a specific route or alternate route (via transit) and see the time available and price and then decide.
Now the DGCA rule of asking airlines will have no impact. I have seen the sheets at above links. Airlines did it only to satisfy DGCA demand otherwise they have no intention of doing it. So they made the sheets in a way that it is difficult for people to get any info unless they put effort.
Now compare that effort in finding out prices on each airline site to that of makemytrip.com. Here you can type a route and date and you get comparitive prices of diff airlines.
DGCA has started the process with good intent. Now the result is half full.
They should start a software in their site similar to makemytrip.com and ask every member airline to fill and update pricing, time, services provided onboard info there so that ordinary people can get info of all airlines at one place and benifit from it. Also if any airline is cheating by charging more, people can simply complain to DGCA (price shown on DGCA site and actual charge) and get back excess charge.
Just my two paisa :)