Another Air Fare Hike

The airline companies simply can’t seem to catch a break and unfortunately neither can airline passengers. Once again the airline sector is all set to hike air fares across domestic routes on all flights. The country’s two biggest airliners, Kingfisher and Jet Airways have already announced that they will indeed be raising prices by as much as Four Hundred rupees a ticket. This time the excuse for the price hike being given is the all too often heard ‘fuel surcharge’.

For the past one year airline passengers have been subject to  one agony after another ,all of which have been ways of raising money for the airline companies either in the name of ‘maintenance fees’, ’infrastructure fee’, ’user development fee’ or simply the fuel surcharge.

Airliners did face a huge deficit for most of last year because of the very high price of crude oil and it’s direct impact on Aviation Turbine Fuel, thus it was justified in some sense for prices to be hiked then.

This time though the surcharge is being blamed once again on the rising price of ATF, which is almost 35% costlier. This hike is a proactive move by the two biggest domestic airline companies simply because they know that they are unlikely to face any opposition from the government.

The state owned Air India is in a position far worse than that of private companies which is why it is not surprising to see the largely vocal Minister For Civil Aviation, Praful Patel keeping quiet. A few months ago when airliners raised ticket prices he was the first one to criticize the move proclaiming that Air India would ‘show them the way’ by reducing ticket fares.

Here’s the catch: he was making those statements during election time. Now that it’s over Praful Patel can afford to be seen as not that critical and citing ‘economic’ reasons for the hike in ticket prices.

In fact indications are already doing the rounds that Air India too might follow suit and raise its ticket prices. It too might start charging a fuel surcharge. It might very well have no choice. It recently made known that it had delayed the salaries of as many as thirty thousand employees by a fortnight. The employees are making plans to launch a strike to protest this decision.

This is why Air India has no choice but to hike fares .Sensing the moment and knowing that they were unlikely to face opposition from the government Jet and Kingfisher have made the first move by hiking fares. Other airlines are expected to follow soon.

It’s a cheeky way of building up margins and is more than likely to pay off. However for the airline passenger his ticket price becomes costly once more impacting his travel plans. Die hard travelers including businessmen have no choice but to use airline travel.

The Railway Ministry is likely to take advantage of this move and create a situation for stimulating demand in next month’s Railway Budget. The airlines’ loss is the railways gain and hopefully the traveler’s too.