I never thought I’d be one of the 600,000 stranded — but when IndiGo’s crisis hit this week, I found myself stuck among others watching travel plans unravel in real time.
My trouble began on Dec. 3, when I arrived at the airport expecting a routine flight from Calcutta (CCU) to Hyderabad (HYD). Counters were jammed; no clear announcements. I heard that hundreds of flights had been canceled across the country.
According to India’s aviation regulator, IndiGo canceled and refunded a staggering 586,705 flight bookings between Dec. 1 and Dec. 7, resulting in refund payouts of approximately ₹569.65 crore (roughly $68 million). When including cancellations going back to Nov. 21, the total number of bookings that were canceled and refunded climbed to 955,591, with the airline issuing refunds totaling about ₹827 crore (around $99 million).
What made things worse was the complete lack of communication — one second, you were waiting, the next, you were left with whispers of endless delays, cancelations, and chaos. People with kids, elderly passengers, business travelers scrambling for alternative flights or refunds. I heard dozens of panicked messages from fellow passengers — some were given new flight times 24 hours later, others were forced to abandon their plans altogether.
READ: Massive IndiGo meltdown brings India’s aviation system to its knees (
The disruption intensified between Dec. 3 and Dec. 5, when IndiGo, which operates about 112 flights daily out of Kolkata, canceled more than 150 flights. Many of the flights that did depart were delayed by several hours, and a number of others were rescheduled. Travel chaos peaked on Dec. 5, as passengers booked on nearly 50 flights discovered at the last minute that their flights had been canceled, creating widespread frustration and confusion at the airport.
What began as a series of minor delays escalated on December 5 into over 1,000 flight cancellations, leaving travelers stranded and forcing many to miss weddings, funerals, and important exams.
As the hours dragged on, frustration and anger grew. On social media and in airport halls, people were calling this a “meltdown,” blaming the airline for mismanagement.
I was rebooked on a rerouted flight with a stopover, even though my original itinerary was nonstop. When that, too, fell through after another full day of delays, I was issued yet another ticket — this time for Dec. 5. As the same thing happened for the third day in a row, this time all flights booked from Dec. 5-15 were cancelled and were issued notices of refunds.
The ongoing travel chaos has been largely attributed to the airline’s uneven pilot scheduling and rostering, which was disrupted after the full rollout of stricter rest and duty regulations on Nov. 1.
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Is IndiGo — India’s biggest airline — just too dominant to care when things go wrong? While it issued a “heartfelt apology,” it also noted that airline operations would not be stabilized till Feb. 10, 2026 which is two months away. As the clock ticked each day, alternate travel options narrowed down with a bottleneck forming for trains and buses. Why were other airlines unavailable? IndiGo’s near monopoly over the domestic air travel market in India shines with the latest meltdown — no other airline contenders, namely Air India, SpiceJet or Akasa, had flights available and even if they did, the prices were hiked 10 times over, making air travel next to impossible in the country.
While this incident vaguely reminded me of the holiday season crunch the United States has during Christmas and Thanksgiving every year with millions traveling across the country — this level of mass cancellations, leaving thousands of passengers stranded helpless felt more reminiscent of air travel during the COVID-19.
When one airline accounts for such a huge share of national air travel, its failures ripple across thousands of lives. For many of us, this week’s chaos was proof that their size and near-monopoly give them a safety net — even as passengers bear the cost.