India’s largest budget airline IndiGo is testing a reservation feature that will allow women to avoid booking a seat next to men on flights.
The feature, the first of its kind for an airline, works by showing female travelers a pink seat on the seat selection page if it will be occupied by a female passenger, a company spokesperson told CNBC Travel.
Male travelers, however, will not see this information, the company said.
Travelers on IndiGo must identify their gender when purchasing tickets, which allows the airline to control access to those details, according to Indigo.
The carrier began offering the service in May on a pilot basis and is available on all flights, the company said. However, IndiGo’s website and mobile app did not feature the feature when CNBC checked.
The new feature has received “positive individual reactions” on social media, IndiGo’s CEO told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” last week.
“Technology now allows some things that weren’t possible before. We brought [the initiative] as a trial… It has responded very well with our customers, but also internationally,” said CEO Pieter Elbers.
Why do women want to avoid sitting next to men?
An IndiGo spokesperson told CNBC Travel that the new feature is designed to make flights “more comfortable for our female passengers.”
Many users on social media platforms X and Reddit praised IndiGo’s new initiative, with some commenting that it’s “such good news” after bad experiences traveling alone and “glad it’s available”, citing personal experiences that touched them . flights.
Reddit users are in favor of IndiGo’s new initiative.
CNBC
Others complained that male passengers sometimes sit with their legs open, making female neighbors uncomfortable.
However, some comments called the booking feature discriminatory and sexist. Some also asked how the airline would handle cases of men who identify as women.
The IndiGo spokesperson said the booking feature is based on market research and aligns “with our #GirlPower ethos”.
However, he did not immediately respond to CNBC’s questions about whether the service was introduced because of reports of recent in-flight incidents involving men — including a 2023 incident where drunk man urinated on a female passenger during an Air India flight from New York to Delhi.
Other incidents involve male passengers touching women on flights. On an IndiGo flight from Mumbai to Guwahati in September 2023, a male passenger raised the armrest between him and a female passenger and touched her inappropriately while he was sleeping, according to the Indian news agency The Economic Times.
In 2019, a 39-year-old male Indian citizen and permanent resident of Singapore was sentenced to four months in prison for harassment and inappropriate contact with a 22-year-old flight attendant during a flight from Cochin to Singapore. The flight attendant testified that the passenger smelled of alcohol and boarded the flights with his pants unzipped, Singapore media reported.
In 2023, IndiGo became the first Indian airline carries 100 million passengers in a calendar year.
The world’s most populous country is taking significant steps to supplement its tourism sector. Indian travelers are projected to take 5 billion leisure trips by 2030, of which 99% are expected to be domestic, according to an October report by Booking.com and McKinsey.
