A family from south Calcutta, set to travel to Varanasi for a holiday on a 10am IndiGo flight on Wednesday, was informed at 9pm the previous night that their flight had been cancelled because of “bad weather”.

The only alternative offered by the airline was seats on December 27.

Left with little choice, the family hired a car to Varanasi, spending ₹43,000 on the journey. The road trip took more than 14 hours, compared with the less than
one-and-a-half hours the flight would have taken. They left home at 4.30am and reached Varanasi late in the evening.

The man, his wife and their daughter had planned a week-long trip to Varanasi and Lucknow. They had purchased tickets on the IndiGo flight for around ₹20,000.

“They had completed web check-in and already had their boarding passes. But around 9pm on Tuesday, the airline informed him that the flight was cancelled due to bad weather,” said a family member. “They had booked hotels well in advance, so he requested the airline to rebook them on another flight.”

“The airline said the earliest available seats were on December 27. He then asked for seats on flights to Lucknow or Allahabad, but was told there were none,” the family member added.

According to Calcutta airport sources, the cancelled 186-seat flight was fully booked. They added that several flights to and from Varanasi were cancelled on Wednesday due to fog.

Metro had earlier reported how several passengers had cancelled travel plans this holiday season following the crisis at IndiGo earlier this month. The airline had cancelled around 3,500 flights in the first week of December after new rules issued by the directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) on pilot duty timings came into effect.

Many passengers were also inconvenienced by delayed or misplaced baggage at their destinations.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the airline said: “IndiGo, after having fully stabilised its operations since December 9, 2025, has been steadily adding capacity, within government guidelines. We have been consistently operating 2,100-2,200 flights and carrying over one million customers every three days.
We have been flying to and from all 138 operational destinations across our network while maintaining the IndiGo standards of on-time performance.”

“With this, we are pleased to confirm that we are fully prepared to cater to the surge in demand during this holiday season,” it added.

The airline also referred to weather-related disruptions.

“In recent days, the aviation sector experienced industry-wide disruptions due to dense fog, particularly across northern India. Like all airlines, we were impacted too; however, the operations were effectively managed, under the circumstances, to maintain operational stability. With forecasts indicating a harsher winter ahead, we remain committed to ensuring reliability and minimizing disruptions across our network to ensure least inconvenience to our customers,” the statement said.

Tour operators, however, said demand for domestic air travel remained subdued despite the holiday season.

On Wednesday evening, a one-way ticket to Delhi for December 25 was priced at around ₹10,000, while fares to Mumbai were about ₹8,000. A one-way ticket to Bengaluru was selling for around ₹12,000, according to tour operators.

“These are more or less the usual fares for tickets booked a day before departure,” said Anil Punjabi, chairman of the Travel Agents Federation of India (TAFI), eastern region. “But this year, demand continues to be low. Many people are apprehensive about flying, worried they might get stranded because of cancellations or delays.”