Airline executives however said that such a rule will be difficult to implement without a fixed timeline as passengers may turn at the airport at the last moment when other seats have been occupied.
The creation of the new rule comes in response to complaints on social media from passengers who say they have been asked to pay for seats or seat apart from their children, some as young as 8 years.
On March 31, Akshay Baheti wrote on social media that IndiGo had allotted four different seats for him, his wife and two children who are three and eight years old.
DGCA has now introduced a new clause mandating this in its air transport circular on unbundling of services which allows airlines to charge separately for some services like seats, meals.
“Airlines shall ensure that children up to the age of 12 years are allocated seats with atleast one of their parents/guardians, who are travelling on the same PNR and a record of the same shall be maintained,” says the new clause added to the circularOfficials of Air India and Vistara said that they try to seat families together as much as possible and many of their seats are provided free.For instance for Air India, preferred seating is only open for window, aisle, and middle seats in the front and middle zones of the aircraft. All seats in the back end of the aircraft are currently available free of charge on a first-come, first-served basis.
However, the booking engine of IndiGo allows passengers to check in for a flight without selecting a seat by using the auto-assigned seat option. But, the airline says that it may not ensure passengers including minors will be seated together.
A senior executive of a private airline said that airlines will have to update their seat map technology to ensure its system would automatically assign at least one parent a seat with their children under 12.
However, he pointed out that the regulator needs to fix a time before which a passenger travelling with children has to block the seats.
“Let’s say at six hours before departure, 10 seats are left in the aircraft, all in different rows, and a family of 4 with 2 adults and 2 kids wants to book, should the airline block them from booking their travel or move other passengers who may have paid for seats and refund that amount to those guests?,” the executive asked.
Unbundling of seats splits the total ticket price into components and can make air travel cheaper for passengers who are fine with flying without the services.
While full service carriers provide these services as complimentary, low cost carriers sell these as add on in order to earn ancillary revenue.
But there has been criticism from passengers across the world, that in some cases add-on charges are becoming anti-consumer.
In US, the Biden administration is asking Congress to pass legislation that would ban airlines from charging fees for families who are traveling with children under the age of 14 to sit together
