1/3rd of flights late, Jet Airways beat Air India in being tardy last year

National carrier Air India has always been the worst in punctuality, but now that ignominy has passed to Jet Airways in India. It got the tag of the worst on-time performance in eight out of 12 months in 2017, with as many as a third of its departures delayed.

Jet Airways and Jet Lite carried 20.7 million domestic passengers in 2017. For the businessmen, industrialists, corporates and other frequent flyers among this lot, Jet's poor punctuality record has turned flying into a pain.

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Air India largely had the worst on-time performance (OTP) up until March 2017, shows domestic airline OTP data collected from Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the Indian regulator. In April and May, Jet Airways fell to the bottom-most slot, but recovered to fare marginally better than Air India in June. Thereafter, Jet has firmly stayed put at the bottom-most rung through 2017 to log a 70% OTP for its domestic flights (see graphic). Jet did not respond to a questionnaire sent by TOI.

Air India (72%) was better than Jet, but not better than Vistara (76%). The three together make up India's entire cache of full-service carriers, the only airlines that offer frequent flyer programmes with privileges like zero cancellation and rebooking fees that frequent flyers survive on.

India may be the third largest domestic aviation market in the world, but the downgrade in Jet Airways' punctuality — alongside the mediocre show of AI and Vistara — has meant that Corporate India doesn't have a single reliable full-service carrier to bank on. "Of the three full-service airlines in India, one is a public sector one, another is a fairly new airline with limited operations.

Then there is Jet Airways, with more than 24 years of existence. Over the years, it has become popular with businessmen, professionals, industrialists because it offers both business class and economy and has a frequent flyer programme that gives benefits like zero cancellation fee, no reschedulement fee for its platinum card members. They have more than 25,000 platinum card members who fly domestic frequently and they are the worst hit," said Sudhakara Reddy, a businessman, frequent flyer and president of the consumer rights body, Air Passengers Association of India. To earn a Jet platinum card, one has to board 60 Jet flights a year or accumulate 90,000 miles.

In the past six months, scores of frequent flyers would have found themselves killing time at airports, missing meetings, engagements. On Monday, till 10.40am, the departure gate screen at Mumbai airport showed that Jet's 11am flight 9W 307 to Delhi was on time. "Then they suddenly announced it's been delayed to 12.45pm for operational reasons," said a Jet platinum card member, requesting anonymity. "I kept checking online till I left home and till 20 minutes before the scheduled time of departure, it kept saying 'on time'. Jet has become really bad. I'm sure there must be others like me who have begun to hate flying," he added.

Siddharth Bothra, another Jet platinum card member, said: "Jet flights often come in late from other stations. I've lost count of the number of times I've missed important meetings. Last year, I missed a Kolkata-Kunming China Eastern connection as the Jet Airways Mumbai-Kolkata flight landed late."

Though Vistara fared better than Air India and Jet, it's a three-year-old fledgling with a puny market share of 3.5%. Full-service carriers account for 34.6% of market share, while low-cost airlines make up the rest. IndiGo alone has a market share of 39.6%. But LCCs are not a preferred option for frequent flyers because of the heavy cancellation, reschedulement fees (Rs 3,000 or more) they levy.

Jet fared better than Air India when international performance was factored in. Jet (66.2%) was placed at 85th rank and Air India (60.2%) at 98 by UK air travel intelligence company OAG which culled OTP data of 103 carriers and recently released an annual punctuality league list for 2017.