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Simply Speaking: The Indigo Lesson
When Your Shop is Broken, Don’t Let Customers Walk In. Selling more inventory is not revenue capture but brand suicide, writes Shubhranshu Singh.
IndiGo now faces its reputational identity test.
In aviation, reliability is the product.
IndiGo understood that for over a decade. It differentiated not on food, not on frills, not on leg-room but on promise that more times than with anyone else, you would reach on time.
That code is now broken.
That reputation is in tatters.
That differentiation is smeared.
When your shop is broken, you do not keep the doors open and allow customers to walk in.
Shamefully, Indigo was doing this. With rosters stretched, regulatory resets underway, crew availability collapsing, and aircraft deployed beyond buffer capacity, IndiGo continued selling, boarding, rescheduling, cancelling and stranding passengers across multiple hubs and did so with thin communication. It was operationally broken, but the storefront remained wide open.
The Brand Promise Is Now the Brand Risk
The brand earned its fame as an outcome of a precision engineering style operating system. It worked because the airline ran tighter turnarounds than competitors, flights took off and landed when they said they would, costs were structured predictably and the entire journey was designed to eliminate friction for the everyday traveller. The brand was all about flying reliably. That was its cultural code where efficiency was expressed as customer experience.
That operating code separated IndiGo from every airline since it represented order, not price. It is why this meltdown hurts it deeper.
Indigo’s brand’s differentiation was punctuality. So, widespread cancellations are not a service problem but an identity collapse.
This Was Not a Weather Event
India has seen airline disruptions before on account of fog, monsoon delays, airport shutdowns.
But this moment is different.Crew supply fell behind regulatory changes. Hiring and training pipelines lagged and could not have been unknown within the system. Aircraft scheduling was stretched with obvious reluctance that delayed corrections
This was not local turbulence but a structural misunderstanding of capacity limits.
The right response is radical transparency. Alas, that’s far from the case. IndiGo needed a bold operational timeout. It should suspend flights. It ought to reset schedules. It must communicate clearly and all the time. What is the deafening silence and stupid boilerplate tweeting all about !?
Airlines globally have done this when the operating spine buckles.
I was there yesterday with hundreds of passengers at Mumbai’s Terminal 2. My suitcase is somewhere with Indigo. What I saw was ugly.
Customers will not remember the cancelled ticket.
They remember a cancelled ticket with no clarity.
They will remember children sleeping on the cold floor.
They will remember sitting 8 hours without information.
They will remember helpless airline staff, equally uninformed.
That memory will mean a market migration. Even though the choice(s) be hardly inspiring !
What IndiGo Must Do Now
1. Declare a defined reset period.
Better to over correct for a week than take brand back indefinitely.
2. Publish a new operational rulebook.
Crew buffers, fleet backup, rostering norms, schedule contingency. Don’t operate without clarity.
3. Communicate 24/7 about timelines, delays, live system status and make it visible everywhere. Instead you are lying or avoiding providing clarity.
This moment is recoverable.But you will fall if you pretend it’s business as usual .
The Leadership Test
IndiGo now faces its reputational identity test.
There is a short window where decisive accountability restores confidence rather than diminishes it.
If Indigo continues operating a stressed set up while customers walk through the door, the customer collective will punish it silently, ticket by ticket.
Unlike an aircraft , customers can take off when they like !
The 6Es that Indigo needs :
- Empathy
- Engagement
- Effort
- Efficiency
- Equity
- Explanation
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