NEW DELHI: Air ticket prices, booked for the same day travel, were exorbitantly expensive on Sunday and on some routes, it was as high as 10 times than normal fares. In many routes, economy class tickets were priced way above what average business class fares were a month ago.
A search on various portals showed that a single flight ticket on economy class from Delhi to Delhi for same-day travel was priced between Rs 17,000 and Rs 29,000. The one-way economy flight ticket between Delhi and Chennai was sold for R68,000 by Air India. Historical data showed flight ticket prices between Delhi and Chennai hovered around R6,000 about a month ago.
Coming to other popular routes, one-way ticket prices from Delhi to Bengaluru were sold between R24,000 and R40,000 while from Delhi to Hyderabad it was between R28,000 and R 52,000. In the busiest route (Delhi to Mumbai ), air tickets were priced between R15,000-R30,000 on Sunday. In most cases, carriers such as IndiGo and SpiceJet were offering tickets at prices lower than Tata Group-run airlines Air India and Vistara.
Airfares have skyrocketed since the grounding of cash-strapped Go First on May 3. Union Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said they have put together a group to study the spikes. He said, “We are doing a full analysis on these routes and we will speak to our airlines to make sure that fares are within a certain level. We will try our best but it’s an issue created by an unforeseen demand-supply imbalance.”
