DGCA reviews airfare trends ahead of festive season rush, proactively asks airlines to deploy additional flights

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has taken up the matter of monitoring airfares during the festive season, the Ministry of Civil Aviation said on Sunday. The MoCA has directed the DGCA to review airfares and intervene by taking appropriate measures in the event of a surge in prices.

Accordingly, the DGCA has proactively addressed the matter with airlines and requested that they augment flight capacities for the festive season by deploying additional flights to meet the high demand.

In response, IndiGo , India’s largest airline, told the DGCA that it plans to deploy approximately 730 additional flights across 42 sectors during the festive season. Tata Group-owned Air India and Air India Express have disclosed their plans for deploying approximately 486 additional flights across 20 sectors. SpiceJet , on the other hand, plans to deploy approximately 546 additional flights across 38 sectors.

The DGCA will maintain rigorous oversight of airline fares and flight capacities to protect passengers’ interests during the festive season. The festive season often sees users taking to social media to complain about how the surge in airfares makes travel to their hometowns prohibitively expensive. Air tickets have already started to spike ahead of the festive season, with key routes such as Delhi-Mumbai, New Delhi-Kolkata, and Kolkata-Bengaluru showing a 50–80% increase during the festive season, according to a report by The Financial Express.

As thousands of people thronged to Kolkata during Durga Puja, the airfares to Kolkata from metros—including Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai—nearly doubled. According to an analysis by The Times of India, on Panchami, the cheapest one-way tickets showed a significant price increase — ₹11,500 from Mumbai to Kolkata, ₹10,000 from Delhi to Kolkata, ₹11,000 from Chennai to Kolkata, and ₹11,500 from Bengaluru to Kolkata.

This was despite flight tickets to the aforementioned metro cities from Kolkata remaining moderate, according to the TOI report. The surge in prices often leads people to skip destinations like Kolkata during the festive rush. According to media reports, IndiGo introduced 23 additional flights to Kolkata to ease airfares, along with bringing in larger aircraft on selected routes to accommodate more passengers per flight.