On Sunday, I was at the Mumbai Airport Terminal 1A, flying over to Delhi for the holidays. I had a busy year, and I am still not done with it, with social and family commitments to come up for the next few days. Anyhow, the rush at the airport made me realise how many people were heading all over the place: some to visit family, some on vacation and so on.

It may also be that a lot of plans are going belly up because Spicejet is in deep trouble. However, I see, at least on metro segments, all hope is not lost to get home on a reasonable fare. In fact, I myself cancelled a late night ticket on Air India 101 to rebook myself on an afternoon flight to Delhi, just to put their B77L on the list of the planes I’ve flown.

Here are some tips for how to attack this problem, however my guess is it only works on metro segments.

Air India has somehow dropped prices of tickets on metro segments such as BOM-DEL, and is even flying their wide-body planes to clear the holiday rush. So, it makes sense to look at Air India. If you book via their app, you’ll get a 10% further discount on those flights. Imagine, on a next-day BOM-DEL flight, you’ll still be able to get a one-way ticket at INR 6464 (price on the app!) or INR 6723 if you book via the website.

Jet Airways has dropped fares as well, but they are not selling those cheap fares on their website. Shop around on goibibo.com, cleartrip.com etc for these cheap fares. For instance, Jet Airways’ website showed me a lowest possible fare of INR 9036 on the BOM-DEL segment, but somewhere on Goibibo.com I was able to get a ticket for INR 5700 with a fare class that was not being shown on Jet Airways’ website.

This inventory is not phantom, because I was able to book a ticket for real at the price shown here.

Jet Airways is also up gauging some flights, and operating them on the A330s in stead of the Boeing 737s. Also, 12 locations have got new flights on a seasonal pattern (operating till January 31, 2015). Because of bigger planes and new frequencies, the prices on some of these routes may be reasonable.

As the holiday season starts, I wish you the best of travels.

If you have any more observations, do leave them in the comments section below.

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