Travellers taking off from the Kolkata airport will be paying more in the next three years for their flights. The Airports Authority of India (AAI), has proposed hiking the aeronautical tariff of the airport until March 31, 2026.
The airport’s User Development Fee (UDF) currently stands at INR 583 and INR 1402 respectively for domestic and international passengers. This could change to INR 1895 for domestic flights, and INR 4560 for international flights by April 2025.
The AAI has already submitted proposal to the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority of India (AERA), which will take a call on this matter. The aviation industry is one of the most affected ones during this COVID times, and AERA has been trying to strike a balance between the dwindling demand for flights to the increased tarrifs and cash issues faced by airline companies.
It is being predicted that the Kolkata International Airport might see a revival by March 2024, while international revival might take longer than that.
According to AERA, “AAI expects the capacity of (Kolkata) terminal building will get saturated by FY 2024-25. As a result, AAI proposes to undertake capex worth INR 123 crore (of which the aeronautical component is INR 116 crore) to increase capacity of the existing terminal building by undertaking (several measures).”
The User Development Fee will be raised in a graded manner. So the UDF for domestic passengers that is currently at INR 583 was raised to INR 735, and for international passengers that is currently at INR 1401, was raised to INR 1401 from October 1, 2021. Then in April 1, 2023 these will see a further rise by 26 percent. Eventually there will be another increase of 27 percent on April 1 of every fiscal year, until 2025-2026.
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