Airline Gives Women the Choice to Avoid Sitting Next to Men

Leave the boys in coach. In May, India’s largest airline announced a unique pilot program that allowed women to avoid booking seats next to men. Now, after successful trials, the feature is being rolled out across all flights.

IndiGo’s revamped seating policy is designed to “make the travel experience more comfortable [for] female passengers,” per a company statement. Under the new protocol, IndiGo will ask ticket-buyers to identify their gender at checkout, then use the seating map to show female passengers where other women are sitting. Men will not be able to see this information. After months of local trials, the carrier will spend August launching the policy airline-wide, company executives announced last week.

The move is particularly notable given IndiGo’s size. The carrier is currently Asia’s largest individual airline by volume, with over 100 million passengers served in 2023.

While IndiGo’s press release described the new seating protocol in an upbeat manner, calling it a fresh initiative “aligning with [their] #GirlPower ethos,” the decision to allow women to avoid sitting next to men recalls previous instances of sexual harassment aboard airplanes. In September, a female passenger on an IndiGo flight was repeatedly groped by a man in the seat next to her. While the airline turned the perpetrator over to the police upon arrival, the victim described the incident as impossible to escape. “I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I froze,” she told The Times of India.

In an April report, the FBI announced that it had opened 96 in-flight sexual assault cases in 2023. Though that investigation only probed American carriers, it represents a broader trend of unruly passenger behavior industry-wide. “Typically men are the perpetrators,” the FBI release explained, “and women and unaccompanied minors are the victims.”

IndiGo’s policy change emulates programs adopted by car rideshare services in recent years. In 2022, Uber released Women Rider Preference, an option initially designed for Saudi Arabia and quickly launched globally in which female drivers can note their preference to only receive trip requests from women. In 2023, Lyft followed suit with a similar feature called Women+ Connect.

In an interview with CNBC’s Street Signs Asia, IndiGo CEO Peter Elbers described the seating policy’s journey from conception to reality.

“Technology is now enabling some things which were not available in the past,” Elbers said. ”We brought [the initiative] up as a test.” After three months of consumer polling, the women’s choice program was declared a resounding success. “It has responded very well with our customers, but also internationally.”

Though the initiative is still in the rollout phase, it has already received plenty of online scorn. The majority of the critics appear to be men who feel slighted, and who have taken to the keyboard to, ironically, demand equal protection. But Elbers isn’t letting those faraway voices drown out his vision. The public response “speaks to the innovation of IndiGo and the fact that we move forward,” he explained. “We put a lot of emphasis on our customer experience.”