When it comes to complaints by air travellers, poor customer care service topped the charts followed by flight problems and baggage related issues.
According to the air traffic data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation for December 2018, Air India and Jet Airways faced most flak from passengers, while Vistara reported the least number of complaints.
Various scheduled domestic airlines received 803 complaints in December 2018 of which nearly one-third were related to customer service.
The statistics released by the civil aviation regulator showed that of the 803 complaints in December last year, 32.5% were related to customer service, 30% regarding flight problems and 23.9% pertained to baggage claims.
Staff behaviour amounted to 4.6% of the complaints, while 2.2% air travellers flagged fares of airlines as their concerns. Fares charged by airliners constituted 0.5% of the passenger grievances.
Overall, eight airliners paid Rs 91.48 lakh towards facilities and compensation to 1,675 air travellers who were denied boarding on aircraft, Rs 44.01 lakh was paid towards facilities and compensation to 47,919 passengers for cancellation of flights, while Rs 125.71 lakh was paid to over 1.51 lakh passenger who were affected by delays.
At the four metro airports – Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai – Go Air reported the best on-time performance (83%) among scheduled airlines in December 2018 followed by SpiceJet (77.9%) and Vistara (77.7%). At 72.3%, IndiGo ranked fourth in on-time performance followed by Jet Airways (69.7%) and Air India (61.1%).
The overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines for December is at 0.66%. Air India had the most number of cancellations of 2.40% followed by Trujet (1.07%) and low-cost carrier Spicejet (0.70%).
The DGCA data showed that the passenger load factor for SpiceJet was 92.7% in December 2018 in comparison to 91.1% in November 2018. Passenger load factor for IndiGo, GoAir, Jet Airways, Vistara and Air India was 88.9%, 88.5%, 87%, 83.1% and 81.2% respectively, in December 2018.