While the coronavirus cases are witnessing a little declining trend in many parts of the country, some state governments are planning to ease their lockdown restrictions from 1st June 2021. In the middle of this pandemic time, the civil aviation ministry has made an announcement that is quite important to know for people who plan to fly on domestic routes in the coming months. The announcement is that the lower limit on tickets for domestic air travel has been increased by 15%.
The new revised rates of the air tickets for domestic travel will be into effect from 1 June 2021, as per an official order released by the ministry. The air ticket rates have been increased because of the excess losses that the air carriers in the country had to go through due to the strongest restrictions of the coronavirus lockdown since the last one and a half years.
Due to the curbs to stop the spread of the virus, travelers were mostly at home and canceled their plans to travel by air routes. Moreover, the second wave of the coronavirus has made the air carriers quite difficult to sustain in the industry with much less revenue and huge costs involved in the operations of the passenger flights.
Thus, the aviation ministry has increased the airfares and also decided to reduce the network capacity to airlines. As per the ministry’s update, the lower limit for air tickets of flights with the duration of 40 minutes has been raised by 13%, which means Rs. 2600 from the earlier Rs. 2,300/-. The maximum fare for such flights will be limited to Rs. 7,800/-.
Similarly, lower limits for airplanes with a duration between 40 minutes and 60 minutes have been raised to Rs. 3,300 from the current Rs. 2,900 and the maximum price for such flights are capped at Rs. 9,800/-
This move has come at a time when air travel has been reduced drastically and people are quite doubtful to travel outside in such coronavirus times.
