The government on Monday said it will review airlines’ decision to charge passengers for any of the seats selected at the time of web check-in to ascertain whether the move is in compliance with existing rules. No-frills airline IndiGo, which has a domestic market share of nearly 43 percent, has been levying charges for web check-in from November 14.

Against the backdrop of questions being raised about IndiGo’s move, especially on social media, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has said it would review the decision.

The ministry has noted that airlines are now charging for web check-in for all seats. “We are reviewing this fees to see whether they fall within the unbundled pricing framework,” it added.

The controversy kicked off when IndiGo responded to a query from a passenger on Twitter when the airline's official handle announced that as per its revised policy, all seats are chargeable for web check-in.

However, in a clarification on Monday, the airline said that the pricing is only for advanced seats and when a customer checks in at the airport, seats would be assigned for free. It also said that some seats may be available for free depending on market dynamics.

Devesh Agarwal, aviation expert; Mark Martin, founder & CEO, Martin Consulting; Ajay Awtaney, founder & Editor of Live From A Lounge and Dhiraj Mathur, executive director, PWC, discussed on whether the airlines should be allowed to charge for all seats if passengers check-in online and should such a charge fall under the current unbundling framework.

Mathur said this is nothing new and Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) allowed unbundling of services way back in 2015.

"Globally, in the US it started in 2008 when the price of crude crossed $130 a barrel. The basic idea of unbundling is that a passenger pays only for those services that he/she needs and not for everything else because in a full-service carrier you have a lot of services that are bundled up together and some passengers may not want them,” said Mathur said.

“If you are charging for every seat on a web check-in, then that is against the existing guidelines which allow only for preferential seating,” he added.

This is how the LCC (low-cost carrier) model works, every piece that falls within a consumer preference is charged as a value-add and something which is an add-on to your ticket, Martin said.

"It could be as simple as 5 kg of luggage, to express check-in, to sitting in a lounge, to whatever you need as a paying traveling consumer,” Martin added.

All the low-cost airlines around the world charge for seating and in India, unfortunately, there is not too much of a difference between low-cost carriers and full-service carriers, said Awtaney.

"The preferred term I use for IndiGo or SpiceJet is no-frills carriers because they are operating from the same airports, the kind of terminals charges and everything that they are paying is all the same. So, it is clever marketing where IndiGo and SpiceJet call themselves low-cost carriers," he said.

It is now embedded in the psychology of people that IndiGo is a low-cost carrier, so they kind of don’t comparison shop and just go with them, Awtaney said, adding that the point now is that all these guys are only a couple of hundred rupees lower than Jet Airways or Vistara on most routes, so that is the only differentiating factor.