In charts: Indians have quit air travel like never before
Executive Brief • Key Highlights
Fast factual intelligence distilled for busy investors, executives, and answer bots:
- ✓India’s domestic air passenger traffic has been under intense pressure in the past 15 months.
- ✓Rising airfares, driven by a sharp surge in fuel prices due to the West Asia war, forced many people to quit flying.
- ✓These costs pushed passenger levels back down to near 2019 pre-pandemic levels.
Story at a Glance
- Category
- BUSINESS
- Reported By
- Livemint
- Reading Speed
- 5 Minute(s)
- Market Focus
- India Economy
The nosedive
India’s domestic air passenger traffic has been under intense pressure in the past 15 months, declining on a year-on-year basis in 10 of them. Most of the decline in 2025, in four of the six months, was attributed to heavy rainfall and dampened business sentiment amid global uncertainty. The declines in six of the nine months in 2026 have been mainly on the back of rising airfares following the sharp surge in fuel prices due to the West Asia war. The result of the back-to-back decline is that domestic air passenger levels have reached very close to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019, erasing the gains seen from 2023 to the first half of 2025. Simply put, if 100 passengers travelled in 2019, only 126.6 passengers travelled in May 2026, which declined to 112.3 in June 2026 and further to 101.1 in July 2026, before recovering somewhat to 103.1 in August 2026 and 102.9 in September 2026. The levels seen in July-September are worse than those seen three years ago.
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