It’s a time when as a customer we feel hopeless and alone. The behaviour from the entire aviation industry last week has left us feeling orphaned. We now know that from the top to the bottom layers of private or public aviation, customers are only seen with greed. When the other airlines increased their prices to 10X, empathy got killed a thousand deaths. It was bizarre as this act flouted the principles of branding and marketing. What was bigger? A rare opportunity to grow brand equity with goodwill or earning a couple of thousand dollars on overpricing?
I was hearing the news with quite a disbelief because in marketing, we obsess over brand positioning, customer experience, and loyalty metrics. We write decks about emotional connection. We chase Net Promoter Scores like they’re gospel. And then something like the IndiGo crisis happens, and none of it matters. Over a thousand flights were cancelled in early December. Passengers stranded. Social Media erupted in chaos. And the rest of the aviation industry left all the opportunity to gain genuine goodwill but succumbed to exploitation. The government had to step in with emergency fare caps using distance slabs, with ceilings in the ₹7,500 to ₹18,000 range depending on route length. When regulators have to intervene to stop you from overcharging in a disruption, you have already admitted that internal governance does not exist.
I understand Kumbh where accommodation was priced high because it was a demand vs supply scenario. It was a predictable, voluntary event planned years in advance. But the gesture by the airlines was appalling. They misused the consumer’s vulnerability. That is the day when brand trust, loyalty has left them for good. We talk about loyalty programs and frequent flyer miles and co-branded credit cards. But loyalty is a belief that when things go wrong, the brand will have your back. I foresee an acute transactional relationship in the aviation sector now. Where thousands were directly impacted and lakhs viewed it indirectly, it is going to be tough for customers to be understanding going forward. Back to the booking apps, they will click ‘Book’ not because they trust you, but because they have to – like a utility to be endured.
In every crisis there is a litmus test that checks the character of a brand. ‘Will a brand follow the unwritten rule of “no one left behind” or will it shrug and say “not my problem”? What we saw in aviation last week answered that brutally. The sector treated stranded passengers like expendable pieces on a balance sheet, not citizens who needed to get to exams, surgeries, funerals and year-end milestones. Aviation forgot that it is not selling optional luxuries. It is selling essential mobility. When that access gets auctioned during a disruption, the brand stops feeling like a companion. It is ironic that aviation is one of the most Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) heavy sectors on paper, and yet, at this moment, the S and G are nowhere in sight. The fare surge was a very public admission that governance and social responsibility are still treated as optional extras. Governance is supposed to mean guardrails. It is the discipline that stops a brand from doing something technically possible, commercially tempting, and reputationally catastrophic. A true ESG mindset would have forced boards and CEOs to draw a hard line before the algorithms went rogue.
I was going through the brand identity playbooks of these airlines and realised that everything listed there was entirely harmed by the events of last week. Their visions spoke of enabling dreams, connecting families, powering the economy. Their values mentioned customer-centricity, integrity, care. None of it showed up when it mattered. What showed up was opportunism dressed in demand-supply language. The delayed apologies and compensatory vouchers feel like shallow attempts to avoid losing customers permanently, not genuine reckonings with what went wrong. The industry proved last week that its ‘No Man Left Behind’ policy applies only to profits, never to people. And customers, eventually, return the favour.
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