Spend half an hour in the departure hall of a small Indian airport, and you will see it. A young man in a new shirt, holding his boarding pass a little too carefully. A mother who has come to see her daughter off and is not quite sure where the drop-off area ends. A family of five photographing each other against the glass with the aircraft behind them, because nobody in that family has done this before.
For most of our history, flying said something about who you were. It belonged to the metro, the business traveller, the foreign holiday. That is no longer true, and the change came faster than most of us noticed. In 2014, India had 74 operational airports. By July this year it had 165. Much of that came through UDAN, the regional connectivity scheme launched in 2016 with a name that told you exactly who it was for: “Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik,” or let the ordinary citizen fly. It has since opened 679 routes across 95 airports, heliports and water aerodromes, and carried more than 1.68 crore passengers on over 3.58 lakh flights. On a UDAN route, a one-hour flight is capped at around 2,500 rupees on at least half the seats. That is how first-time flyers enter the market.
And the government has just raised its ambition. Modified UDAN, launched on 4 July with an outlay of 28,840 crore rupees over ten years, aims to turn a hundred unserved airstrips into working airports and build two hundred helipads. So the map will keep filling in.
The quieter revolution is happening inside the terminal.
DigiYatra lets a passenger walk from the entry gate to the boarding gate using nothing but their face. It has now handled more than ten crore journeys across more than 38 airports and cut average entry processing from about fifteen seconds to five. The new greenfield airports are being planned with it built in from day one. It is easy to see this as a convenience for frequent flyers. I think it matters most for the other passenger, the one holding the boarding pass too carefully. An airport has always been a place full of rules nobody explains. Which queue, which document, which counter, how early. A system that recognises you and opens the gate takes much of that anxiety away. It works on the same principle that took UPI to the vegetable seller: the best infrastructure asks almost nothing of the person using it, so the first-time user isn’t at a disadvantage.
Now think about what this passenger means for anyone in the travel business.
They are not the traveller the industry spent thirty years learning to serve. They book on a phone, often in their own language rather than English. They travel for a wedding, an exam, a hospital appointment, a pilgrimage, a new job in a city they have never seen. They compare prices carefully, and when a brand earns their trust, it tends to keep it. And the flight is rarely the whole journey. A hotel at the other end, a taxi, a temple, a relative’s town two hours from the airport.
The Civil Aviation Minister expects annual passenger traffic to reach about 50 crore by 2030 and close to 100 crore by 2040. A large share of that growth will come from people taking their first, second and third flights. That is the market the industry must design for on purpose. Plain language. Support in Indian languages. Packages that begin at the small airport instead of ending at the big one. And staff who treat a nervous question as the start of a lifelong customer rather than an interruption.
Earlier this month, I wrote that India took digital payments to the last shop in the last lane. Aviation is now doing something very similar. The aircraft has reached the district town. The airport is learning to recognise its passenger. Now the rest of us — airlines, hotels, agents and tour operators — must meet that passenger with the same warmth their family showed them at the glass.
Because for them, it is never just a flight. It is the first one.
Written by Vineet Vats Tyagi, National Office In-charge, BJYM | Founder & CEO, Think Small Group
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Travel Trade Insider (TTI))