DGCA to airlines: Scale down tariffs

Dec 09, 2010 - Sridhar Kumaraswami |

New Delhi

The Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is analysing feedback that some of the fares in the tariff charts put up by airlines on their websites are exorbitant and need to be scaled down, top government sources have said. Feedback also suggests that the format of some of the tariff charts put up by some airlines are not passenger-friendly and appear confusing to the passengers.
There is also a view that some of the tariff charts contain too many abbreviations while in some cases, it is unclear whether the fares are all-inclusive or whether these leave out components such as the fuel surcharge. Another problem could be that while the civil aviation ministry was keen on date-wise fares as well apart from route-wise fares, some of the tariff charts do not have date-wise fares. The ministry and DGCA may recommend corrections or changes in some of the charts put up so that these are passenger-friendly.
The government was expecting that airlines would forward the tariff-charts to it for scrutiny before uploading these on the websites. But the airlines went ahead and uploaded it straightaway on their websites from 10 pm on Tuesday. While the government’s deadline for airlines to put up the fares on their websites was by 5 pm on Wednesday, airlines put it up on Tuesday night itself.
“The airlines seem to be sending a message to the government that they don’t like to be pushed around,” commented a top source.
But officially, the civil aviation ministry stated, “Airfares have been uploaded on respective website by airlines. the DGCA is analysing these. Any discrepancy will be looked into.”
The ministry added, “The DGCA’s first step was to ensure transparency in tariff publishing under rule 135. The same has been achieved as all the scheduled domestic airlines have uploaded the airfares on their respective websites. The same data has been sent to the DGCA sector-wise and fare-category wise. The tariff data is being examined for any discrepancy. Observations will be communicated to the airlines to make it more passenger-friendly so that the public have infor-med choice for travel.”
It may be recalled that the Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA), speaking on behalf of the scheduled airlines in the country on Tuesday, had announced that airlines were putting their sector-wise fares on their websites from 10 pm on Tuesday “in a new friendly format”.

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