New Delhi: Airlines in India have agreed not to charge extra for seats after top officials of all airlines met at the Civil Aviation Ministry in New Delhi on Friday. Earlier, airlines had said they will charge extra if passengers wanted to book seats in advance. However, now they say they will only treat certain seats as privileged ones and charge extra for them.
The Civil Aviation Ministry asked all airlines to limit the number of 'privileged' seats for which they could charge a fee, with a few carriers imposing price tags on a very large number of them. The Ministry also asked them to identify the rows of seats to be charged, Civil Aviation Secretary KN Shrivastava said.
However, no upper limit was set on the number of privileged seats or was any time limit fixed for the airlines to take a decision on the issue. Shrivastava said after the hour-long meet that the airlines would report back within a week or ten days.
The Ministry also extended the deadline of reducing the number of foreign pilots to zero by three years till 2016 while asking the carriers to reduce the number of expatriates in their ranks and recruit more Indians holding the Commercial Pilot Licence (CPL), even as trainees, he said. Earlier, the deadline was set for this year....
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