Indigo allows women to avoid booking seats next to men on flights

India’s biggest budget airline IndiGo has been trialing a booking feature that will allow women to avoid booking a seat next to men on flights.

The feature, the first of its kind for an airline, works by showing female travelers a pink seat at the seat selection page if it will be occupied by a female passenger, a company representative told CNBC Travel.

Male travelers, however, will not see this information, the company said.

Travelers on IndiGo must identify their genders when they purchase tickets, which allows the airline to control access to these details, according to Indigo.

The carrier began rolling out the service in May on a pilot basis, and is available on all flights, the company said. However, IndiGo’s website and mobile app did not show the feature when CNBC did a check.

The new feature has received “positive individual reactions” on social media, IndiGo’s CEO told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” last week.

“Technology is now enabling some things which were not able in the past. We brought [the initiative] up as a test … It has responded very well with our customers, but also internationally,” CEO Pieter Elbers said.

An IndiGo representative told CNBC Travel that the new feature is designed to make flying “more comfortable for our female passengers.”

Many users on social media platforms X and Reddit commended IndiGo’s new initiative, with some commenting that it is “such good news” after having bad experiences when traveling alone, and they are “glad it is available,” citing personal experiences of being touched on flights.

Others complained that male passengers sometimes sit with their legs wide apart, making female neighbors uncomfortable.

However, some comments called the booking feature discriminatory and sexist. Some also asked how the airline would manage cases of men identifying as women.

IndiGo’s representative said the booking feature is based on market research and aligns “with our #GirlPower ethos.”

But she didn’t directly respond to CNBC’s questions about whether the service was introduced because of reports of recent in-flight incidents involving men — including a 2023 incident where a drunk man urinated on a female passenger during an Air India flight from New York to Delhi.

Other incidents involve male passengers who touch women on flights. On an IndiGo flight from Mumbai to Guwahati in September 2023, a male passenger lifted the armrest between him and a female passenger and touched her inappropriately while she was asleep, according to the Indian news outlet The Economic Times.

In 2019, a 39-year-old male Indian national and Singapore permanent resident was sentenced to four months in jail for harassing and inappropriately touching a 22-year-old flight attendant during a flight from Cochin to Singapore. The flight attendant testified the passenger smelled of alcohol and boarded the flights with his pants unzipped, Singapore media reported.

In 2023, IndiGo became the first Indian airline to carry 100 million passengers in a calendar year.

The world’s most populous country is making significant strides to turbocharge its tourism sector. Indian travelers are projected to take 5 billion leisure trips by 2030, of which 99% are expected to be domestic, according to an October report by Booking.com and McKinsey.