Can IndiGo regain the trust it lost overnight?
The recent crisis will impact brand IndiGo as it loses the very thing that helped it become the No 1 airline: Reliability
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Prefer us on GoogleLast Updated: Dec 11, 2025, 14:51 IST3 min
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For nearly two decades, IndiGo cultivated its reputation with the patience of an airline that understood the value of small, steady victories. It built an empire on the unglamorous promise of getting people where they needed to be, when they needed to be there, which helped make it the country’s largest airline.
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All of that came undone in a single week.
A wave of cancellations and delays—triggered mostly by pilot-rest rules the airline had two years to prepare for—fractured the trust IndiGo had accumulated flight by flight. The crisis not only stranded thousands of passengers but also shook the image the carrier had spent years building: The one airline Indians booked when they absolutely had to be somewhere on time.
“This crisis has damaged what IndiGo stood for,” says Vandana Singh, chairperson of the aviation cargo wing at the Federation of Aviation Industry in India (FAII). “The airline’s reputation for reliability and punctuality—this lean, mean machine image—has been damaged. The loss of trust is deep. Passengers are now questioning its ability to manage operations and provide a reliable service.”
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IndiGo’s response to the disruption has only added fuel to fire.
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Singh describes “negative publicity all over social media” and “regulatory scrutiny coming after what looked like blackmail by the airline”, adding that the potential penalties and a sliding stock price compound the pain for the airline.
Branding vulnerabilities
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Harish Bijoor, a brand and business strategy expert, doesn’t see a lasting impact on the brand image even as the crisis tests the airline. “Public memory is short,” he says. “Things will bounce back. But what has been exposed is the soft underbelly of brand IndiGo. It seems to be a transactional brand, not an emotional one.”
The founder of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc argues the airline compounded the harm through silence and opacity. “It did not communicate that it had a serious problem,” he says. Passengers kept receiving rolling 30-minute delay notifications when the airline already knew the scale of the disruption. “Integrity in communication is missing,” he says. “Brand is trust, and that trust has been shaken.”
The second major mistake was that once the cancellations happened, the airline should have moved quickly to arrange alternatives and offer compensation, he says. “It could have negotiated with other airlines to accommodate passengers. That’s a long-standing industry practice: When one airline cancels, others step in to help. But in this case, it didn’t seem willing to do that, likely because it didn’t want to lose the associated revenue,” according to Bijoor.
From preferred choice to necessity
Gopa Menon, COO and co-founder of marketing agency Theblurr, says IndiGo has always been the preferred choice not because it was the cheapest, but because it was the most reliable airline. “People may continue to choose it, but it will be out of necessity or lack of options and not because it is the first choice.”
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What makes the fallout more complex is IndiGo’s sheer market dominance. “There are so many sectors where only IndiGo operates; no other airline goes,” Menon says. “Consumers may still choose it because there’s no other option. But that’s a very different kind of loyalty.”
He expects the airline to lean heavily on marketing to steady nerves.
IndiGo's marketing budget for this year is about Rs110-140 crore, according to an industry executive.
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Menon expects IndiGo to ramp up its spending in the next quarter. “It will start spending to gain trust back, but actions speak louder than words.”
Bijoor “fears” the same. “Advertising is the last thing it should do, though I worry that’s exactly what it will do.”
He says IndiGo must invest in branding, not just advertising, making a distinction between the two. “There’s an important difference: Branding is about strategy, while advertising is about execution. Branding is about actually getting your act together; advertising is simply telling people that you have. Instead of saying it has got it right, IndiGo should focus on truly getting it right—by building a brand that is less transactional and more emotional. IndiGo needs to invest deeply in this kind of branding.”
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First Published: Dec 11, 2025, 15:00
Subscribe NowHimani is an Associate Editor at Forbes India where she writes about startups shaking things up, legacy firms seeking fresh grounds, and sectors in the middle of big transformations. Always curious ab
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