Civil aviation ministry to ask airlines to reduce fares and increase passenger load factor

While the traffic on domestic routes has fallen, that on global ones has been growing at around eight per cent

Travel News
Travel News

Concerned over spiralling fares, the civil aviation ministry, which will launch an airfare monitoring cell next week, has decided to ask domestic carriers to reduce rates and increase passenger load factor (PLF) that has been falling even in peak seasons.

The ministry will meet domestic carriers next week to discuss how the upper limit in each bucket could be reduced to bring down average airfares, which have been rising in the past few months. Airlines would have freedom to vary their rates, but within the decided narrowed-down range as per a report in Business Standard.

Under the dynamic airfare policy airlines practise, the fares on a particular day are divided under various buckets, based on an aircraft’s capacity, with a definitive lowest to highest range. 

The average monthly PLF of domestic airlines — the proportion of available seats utilised — is around 72 per cent and the domestic traffic has seen a contraction lately. That has primarily been due to the 20-30 per cent increase in fares over the past year, say civil ministry officials. The total number of passengers in November this year, for instance, dipped 15 per cent from that in the month last year.

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