Civil aviation policy to make air travel expensive, says IATA

NEW DELHI: Government’ s decision to bring all airports under the Hybrid Till model, under the new National Civil Aviation Policy (NCAP), will make air travel more

NEW DELHI: Government’ s decision to bring all airports under the Hybrid Till model, under the new National Civil Aviation Policy (NCAP), will make air travel more expensive and render AERA, the airport tariff regulator, toothless, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said.

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“Passenger charges in India will increase,” said Conrad Clifford, regional vice-president, Asia Pacific, IATA. “It contradicts one of the stated intentions of the policy to make flying affordable.” IATA represents 265 airlines comprising 83% of global traffic.

“While the draft NCAP indicated that ‘tariff at all future airports will be calculated on a hybrid till basis’, the final policy extends it to all airports. This change will impact the basis for tariff determination for private airport sin India and make A ERA a toothless entity,” Clifford said.

Under single-till model both aeronautical and non- aeronautical charges are taken into account to fix landing and parking charges. Under the hybrid model, the charges are calculated by taking all the aeronautical and 30% of the non-aeronautical revenue into account.

Senior airline officials HT spoke to said the single-till model would have helped kept fares down. Tariff determination under the hybrid-till model resulted in an “added burden of ₹1,938 on international departing passengers from Hyderabad and ₹491 for domestic passengers embarking from the airport,” said an airline official.

“In 2014, the CAG concluded that a shared (hybrid) till system would lead to higher charges payable by passengers. The new policy has overturned this with no explanation ,” said another airline official.