IndiGo's reputation deficit

THE ONLY WAY TO WIN THE BATTLE ISN'T WITH LOUDER ADVERTISING - BUT WITH REPAIRED TRUST, RADICAL COMMUNICATION AND SERVICE HUMILITY

- GEETIKA SRIVASTAVA

INDIGO WAS ONCE the easiest airline brand story in India: on-time, affordable, no drama. Not glamorous, not aspirational — just dependable. In aviation, that is gold. But a series of flight cancellations and the management's callous approach has threatened to upend the story. “For an airline which controls 60% market share of the Indian skies, reputation is not a soft asset. It is the business,” says a brand expert.

As the disruptions intensified, the airline's technology and processes, normally cited as its biggest strengths, proved to be strangely absent from the response. Many of the necessary interventions needed basic software triggers and little human intervention. Automatic notifications for cancellations and delays, preset fare caps during crises, and app-triggered vouchers for meals or transport could all have been deployed instantly. Instead, passengers woke up to skyrocketing last-minute fares, slept on terminal floors without information, and waited days for baggage that had never been offloaded.

The problem has snowballed as in the age of social media, one cancellation doesn't travel alone. It arrives with screenshots, reels, angry tweets and media amplification. What once remained inside airport terminals now erupts in public. For a brand built almost entirely on reliability, repeated cancellations carry a double cost: A direct loss of passenger confidence, and a slower, more dangerous loss of reputation equity. So IndiGo's problem is no longer just grounding aircraft—it's grounding expectation.

"They had two years to prepare. This is not an unforeseen natural event, it's a planning failure," says image guru Dilip Cherian. "The company should have done an audit of its pilot strength the moment the notification came out."