Indigo's stocks maybe flying high but passenger patience has hit turbulence

Daybreak

On 9 April, as the world reeling from the tariff standoff between America and China, one Indian company quietly made history.

The stocks of InterGlobe Aviation, the parent company Indigo, India’s top budget airline, hit an all-time high. For a brief moment, Indigo wasn’t just India’s largest airline—it became the most valuable airline in the world. More than Delta even.

Back home though, meanwhile, a different story has been playing out. Thousands of Indian flyers have been complaining online about broken luggage, rude crew, overbooked flights. When cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle tweeted his frustration about Indigo’s service, more than a thousand people replied to his tweet with their own horror stories.

Has Indigo stopped caring about its passengers?

But why would it? It flies nearly 9 million people a month.

The clues, as it turns out, lie inside a grey building in Gurgaon that my colleague Rounak Kumar Gunjan visited recently.

This is Indigo's training centre called iFly where hundreds of young trainees, often barely in their twenties, are taught how to serve tea at 30,000 feet.

Tune in

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.