Unbundling airfares was expected to take off in a while, however the airlines are already set to go ahead and charge exotic varieties of add-on charges on top of your ticketed price right away.

Indigo was one of the first to take off with the new charges, and will now charge an additional Rs. 200 if you want to pre-book a window or aisle seats on their planes. If you want a front row seat or an emergency exit, you should be ready to fork out another Rs. 500 for this privilege. They’ve fondly called this Seat Plus. If you intend to pre-assign a non-premium seat, just pay Rs. 100. This is working out exactly as I predicted on May 1.

Like you see, for an international segment, the charges go up to Rs. 300 for a window/aisle and Rs. 800 for a premium seat. For any other seat, it would be just Rs. 200. However, if you turned up at the airport and these seats are going vacant, you could switch to them for free.

Air India has been working on cutting out the free baggage allowance for customers. It used to have the most generous free baggage allowance of 25 Kgs per customer in Y, which was reduced to 20 Kgs a few years back. And now, a customer on an AI domestic flight can only carry 15 kgs of free baggage, while excess baggage will be charged at Rs. 250/kg. In case you have your Air India Flying Returns number on your ticket, you can still carry 20 kgs without any problems.

With Jet Airways, they are starting to charge for advance seat reservation, albeit only on a single route right now (of Mangalore – Dubai & v.v.). I am not sure if they are test-marketing at the moment or there are other issues w.r.t. rolling this out.

So the party was good while it lasted. Now, get ready to be nickeled & dimed at every step of the way going forward.

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The Indian Civil Aviation market is up for a change, since after years of disallowing unbundling of fares, the aviation regulator & minister have finally come around to allow this move, in line with global practices.

As per the new regulations, notified earlier this evening, the aviation regulator has allowed the following services to be charged for separately:

• Preferential seating
• Meal/snack/drink charges (except drinking water)
• Charge for using Airlines’ lounges
• Check in baggage charges
• Sports equipment carriage
• Musical instrument carriage
• Fee for special declaration of valuable baggage

The regulator expects that base prices of tickets will go down when various services will be unbundled, however, I do not expect this to be the case because airlines in India would rather use this new regulation to top-up on existing ticket prices rather than reducing fares.

There were guidelines set in place to ensure airlines don’t go all out to take us for a ride, and this includes that airlines will need to notify these charges in advance and not club them with the base ticket automatically, rather ask the customer to choose what they want. Also, this means current product bundles such as the Indigo Plus and Spicejet Max will have to be discontinued and/or reinvented. In these packages, the airline allowed payments in advance for meals and seating (a smart way to circumvent existing regulations), however, with new regulations each product/service needs to be selected individually by the passengers.

I already expect Indigo, SpiceJet and GoAir to come up with new charges in the next few days, however, it will be interesting to see Air India turning into the equivalent of a European/American legacy carrier where meals would be priced, and so would be other services. Also, Air Asia India, which is up and coming and expected to start operations in a few months, should be a massive beneficiary of this move.

Jet Airways, which has had plans to do this for the longest time, I expect them to go ahead with this. However their recent alignment with Etihad might allow them to offer a better full-service experience as compared to their peers in the Indian market. I also don’t expect them to charge for lounge access, considering they don’t have many lounges of their own around India anyways and use a lot of contract lounges.

I expect more competition for overhead bin space in the months ahead, what do you think?

Related Posts:

• Get ready to pay for better meals on Jet Airways, and lounge access, and preferential seating

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I’ve liked the Indigo brand from the word go, including their IATA identifier 6E, their look and feel and their tongue in cheek approach to everything including in-flight catering, crew to their advertising. Most of all, their on-time performance and the tight-ship approach which they follow to ensure a professional experience on every flight.

However, it looks like of late the customer-centric approach is being taken over by some amount of arrogance. I’ve met passengers in the past few months who’ve complained of service without a smile, and non-responsiveness from the airline when things don’t go right. I’ve personally faced this issue with them, since they are the only airline who don’t seem to be interested in refunding customers the excess airport fee they collected a few months ago. A couple of emails sent to them, but no response!

However, they’ve taken arrogance to a whole new level at the moment, popping fun at competitors using various media including inflight magazines and hoardings. Past few days, on the airport, you’ll find these tents and adverts floating around thanks to Indigo.

Now, a lot of inferences are going around, but the most discussed one is that these references are all to be made about the now-dead Kingfisher Airlines.

In their in-flight magazine, they take a stab at Jet Konnect/Jet Lite as well, have a look here:

Admittedly, they’ve taken it a bit too far I suppose. Unless they thought they are Virgin with Richard Branson on hand who could use his charisma to get away with anything including this at the launch of Virgin Red last week.

Image courtesy: MSN

Your views? Am I taking this too seriously or is it okay for Indigo to get away with doing all of this and branding a competitor to Rest In Peace? Arrogance in, downfall begins is my belief.

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