Thursday, August 22, 2024 By now, price for flight tickets have increased a lot, loaded even more with several additional charges that can make travel even costlier. In 2022, 1 in 3 consumers who had booked flights had said that the airlines were charging extra fee for seat allotment on the plane. In the current context, a recent social media post made by advocate Shrayansh Singh with regard to enquiring IndiGo’s ‘Cute Fee’ has kindled extensive debate in terms of the transparency and validation of numerous airport fees.
He funnily enquired whether the charge was for being ‘cute’ or its someway connected to the personal cuteness of the airline, which in a second arrested the attention of the netizens and flickered a prominent retort from the airline company. If we go back to the original tweet of Singh, he had shown his utter dissatisfaction with the ‘Cute Fee,’ together with sundry other charges like the Aviation Security Fee, User Development Fee, to name a few, which he highlighted as pretty indistinct and apparently illogical. Singh directly inquired about what exactly is this ‘Cute Fee’.
Do the company charge passengers for being delightful? Or they charge users because they consider that their aircrafts are cute. The tweet readily went viral. Many users started resounding the concerns highlighted by Singh and expressing their own experiences related to the fees of the airlines.
On the other hand, the airline responded to Singh’s query fast by elucidating that by ‘Cute Fee’ they mean Common User Terminal Equipment charge. As per the airline, this cute fee encompasses the use of different facilities of the airport, comprising metal detectors, escalators, and other equipment that passengers make use while accessing the airport. The response on the part of airlines however, did little to suppress the concerns of Singh.
Nevertheless, Singh continued arguing at this point and emphasized that airport security equipment like the metal detectors, fall under the accountability of the Central Industrial Security Force and ideally it should be sponsored by the government resources. He said that the metal detectors are a property of the CISF, which is government’s security organization. He questioned that why the passengers should bear the cost of what he considered should be a government-aided service.
The discussion didn’t conclude there. He also said that such infrastructure should be maintained with the help of public funds and tax revenues, not being passed on to the court of the passengers under the label of additional fees. His post triggered further debate, with few backing up his attitude on this issue, while others defended the need of the airlines to cover operative costs.
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