'Fake shortage of seats': Parliamentary panel flags ‘dark patterns’ of airlines

Ever booked an airline ticket in haste after seeing that almost all seats have been sold? A Parliamentary Standing Committee feels that airlines are sometimes faking shortage of seats on websites and fleecing potential flyers.

It has now asked the Ministry of Civil Aviation to formulate appropriate guidelines regarding rationalisation of fares and publishing correct information on websites of airlines, amid flagging concerns about 'dark patterns' -- practices employed by companies on digital platforms to attract more business.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport Tourism and Culture in its report on Demands for Grants (2023-24) of the Ministry of Civil Aviation expressed concern about the "high fares" charged by private airlines in the domestic sector.

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It went on to say that "wrong information" was posted on private airlines' websites regarding the "number of seats left in the flight and the prices of the tickets".

"The level of misinformation can be gauged from the fact that even after the last tickets have been sold, the same number of seats show on the website, as indicated before the tickets sale. This indicates that airline operators are misguiding the public and forcing passengers to pay more," the panel, headed by YSR Congress MP V Vijayasai Reddy, said.

Critical of the practice of "predatory pricing" by some airlines, the panel also asked whether the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) at any juncture intervened to check the fares.

The report said an airline may sell its tickets at such a low level that competitors cannot compete and are forced to exit the market. "A company that does this (predatory pricing) will see initial losses, but eventually it benefits by driving competitions out of the market and raising its prices again," it said.

The Committee observed that the Ministry has a responsibility to the travelling public and the nation at large to ensure that "predatory pricing mechanism is not adopted by the airlines under the cloak of free market economy".

It said there should be a mechanism with the Ministry such as capping of upper and lower prices to stop predatory pricing or the sudden surge in prices. "A perfect balance has to be maintained between the commercial interest of the private airlines and the interest of the passengers so as to enable the private airlines to grow and at the same time the interest of passengers should also be kept in mind, so that they are not fleeced in the garb of commercialisation," the report said.

"In case the private airlines do not publish the correct information regarding fares, they should be penalised for it," it said while recommending that the DGCA may be empowered to regulate tariffs based on the data generated by their monitoring department or otherwise.

The panel also expressed concern about airlines charging different fares for the same sector, route and same direction of flights. This is specifically so for the north-east region and hilly areas, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, where the prices of domestic sector tickets are, sometimes even more than the international airline sector prices, it added.