India-Based Airline Offers Women-Only Seating With New Booking Feature
The move comes amid ongoing reports of sexual harassment and assault while traveling.
Air travel is often stressful, but for female travelers, there is often an added stressor: Is the guy sitting next to me on this plane going to be a creep? And, yes, we know “not all men,” but every woman has a story about a man, and they don’t exactly wear badges to let you know which ones are going to be a problem.
That’s why India-based airline IndiGo, one of the largest airlines in the world, has launched an initiative that will allow female passengers to choose female seatmates.
The program, which is currently in its pilot phase (no pun intended) works like this: When booking a ticket, customers have to select their gender. Female passengers will be able to see the selected gender of other passengers on a seating chart (women are labeled in, what else, pink), whether they’re booking for just themselves or for their families.
Male passengers will be in the dark when choosing their seats.
The program comes on the heels of reports of harassment from women flying IndiGo, noting being groped by male passengers, both during a flight and while waiting to board.
Certainly, however, this is not a concern limited to a single airline. Google any combination of “grope,” “passenger,” and “airplane,” and you can find stories going back decades to earlier this summer, when a 70-year-old man was arrested for groping a 15-year-old girl traveling with her guardian during a flight from Atlanta to Seattle.
A report from the FBI earlier this year highlights the scope of this issue, reporting nearly 100 reported cases of in-flight sexual assault; women and unaccompanied minors were the most likely victims. IndiGo is India’s largest budget airline, operating 2,000 domestic and international flights a day. So, this program has the potential to make a big difference.
In a statement to CNN, IndiGo said, “We are committed to providing an unparalleled travel experience for all our passengers, and this new feature is just one of the many steps we are taking towards achieving that goal.”
It also noted that the move aligns with the company’s #GirlPower ethos. And, indeed, IndiGo boasts more female pilots than any other airline in the world — 680 as of 2022.
Air travel is chaotic enough — from getting through the airport to dealing with the annoyances of sitting on a plane to worrying whether your luggage got through OK — it’s nice to think that this new feature can give passengers one less thing to worry about.
