Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 5: The worst-hit Indian carrier IndiGo hopes to ease the current chaotic situation in flight schedules in the next five to 10 days.
The IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers, in a video statement released after more than a thousand flights were cancelled on Friday making it the “most severely impacted day” in terms of cancellations, apologised for the inconveniences caused to its patrons and said even though the crisis would persist on Saturday, the airline hoped the cancellations would be fewer than 1,000.
But for the normalisation of the services after the government decided to keep the pilots’ rest schedules in abeyance for the time being, it said, “Full normalisation is expected between December 10 and 15, though IndiGo cautions that recovery will take time due to the scale of operations,” the CEO said.
Acknowledging that Friday, December 5, was the most severely impacted day due to the number of IndiGo flight cancellations being well over 1,000, Elbers extended an apology. “I, on behalf of all of us at IndiGo, would like to extend our sincerest apologies for the major inconvenience this has caused to many of our customers on account of delays or cancellations,” he said in the video.
Elbers said the airline has taken three lines of actions to address the crisis and aid its customers, which are-
“Firstly, Customer communication and addressing your needs. For this, messages have been sent on social media and just now a more detailed communication with information on refunds, cancellations and other customer support measures was sent. Also, we have stepped up our call centre capacity.”
“Secondly, due to yesterday’s situation we had customers stranded mostly at the nation’s largest airports. Our focus was, for all of them to travel today itself, which will be achieved. For this, we also ask customers whose flights are cancelled not to come to airports as notifications are sent on this.”
“Thirdly, cancellations were made for today as to align our crew and planes to be where they need to start afresh tomorrow morning. Earlier measures of the last few days, regrettable, have proven not to be enough, but we have decided today to reboot all our systems and schedules, resulting in the highest numbers of cancellations so far, but imperative for progressive improvements starting from tomorrow,” he added.
Mr Elbers said the staff of IndiGo has been working “relentlessly” to address the crisis and added that they were making efforts to restore the belief of their customers.
“I do understand that these disruptions have caused much discomfort to our customers and has shaken their belief in IndiGo’s reliability carefully build over past 19 years. My colleagues, all the great IndiGo teams and frontline staff have been working relentlessly to address this situation. Rest assured, we are doing everything in our control to not only restore your trust and belief, but strengthen it further over time,” he said.
IndiGo services has been worst-hit because of the massive size of its operations. The largest private carrier operates around 2,300 domestic and international flights daily. As airports witnessed chaotic scenes, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) stepped in to grant IndiGo a temporary exemption from stricter night duty rules for pilots. It also allowed substitution of leaves with a weekly rest period to help the airlines ease the situation and work out to recruit more crew to operate its fleet in due time.
