“Cancellations were made for today as to align our crew and planes to be where they need to start afresh tomorrow morning,” he said.
IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers Friday issued a public apology while acknowledging that the airline faced most severe impact of flight disruptions on December 5 with well over a thousand, or more than half of their daily flights cancelled.
“Cancellations were made for today as to align our crew and planes to be where they need to start afresh tomorrow morning,” he said.
Read his full statement
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am Pieter Elbers, the CEO of IndiGo. I want to share with you that we have experienced severe operational disruptions for the past few days. Since then, the crisis continued to aggravate, with today, December 5th, being the most severely impacted day with the number of cancellations well over 1.000, or more than half of our daily flights.
I, on behalf of all of us at IndiGo, would like to extend our sincerest apologies for the major inconvenience this has caused to many of our customers on account of delays or cancellations.
This situation is a result of various causes, yet for you as a customer it’s important how we, as IndiGo, address this.
We have three lines of action:
– Firstly, Customer communication and addressing your needs. For this, messages have been sent on social media and just now a more detailed communication with information on refunds, cancellations and other customer support measures was sent. Also, we have stepped up our call center capacity.
– Secondly, due to yesterday’s situation we had customers stranded mostly at the nation’s largest airports. Our focus was, for all of them to travel today itself, which will be achieved. For this, we also ask customers whose flights are cancelled not to come to airports as notifications are sent on this.
– Thirdly, cancellations were made for today as to align our crew and planes to be where they need to start afresh tomorrow morning.
Regrettably, earlier measures of the last few days have proven not to be enough. So we decided today for a reboot of all our systems and schedules, resulting in the highest number of cancellations so far, but imperative for progressive improvements starting tomorrow onwards.
With these actions we expect tomorrow to have cancellations below 1.000. The support of DGCA in providing specific FDTL implementation relief, is of great help.
Still, there is lot of work in progress, but going forward from here, in alignment with Ministry of Civil Aviation and DGCA, we expect to further improve every day. Given the size, scale and complexity of our operations, it will take some time to return to a full normal situation, which we anticipate between 10 and 15 December.
I do understand that these disruptions have caused much discomfort to our customers and has shaken their belief in IndiGo’s reliability carefully build over past 19 years. My colleagues, all the great IndiGo teams and frontline staff have been working relentlessly to address this situation.
Rest assured, we are doing everything in our control to not only restore your trust and belief, but
strengthen it further over time.
Thank you for your patience, understanding and kindness during this difficult time. We shall keep
you updated on a ongoing basis.
