Indian budget carrier IndiGo will now indicate where female passengers are seated during check-in in an effort to help other female passengers avoid sitting by unwanted men.
IndiGo Now Lets Female Passengers See Where Other Passengers Are Seated On Check-In Seat Map
Let’s be clear at the outset: this is not a way for creepy males to directly target potential female companions. Rather, IndiGo will allow female passengers to see where other passengers are seated during check-in.
As noted by Live from a Lounge, when a female passenger checks in, she will be able to see which other seats are occupied by females on the seatmap. As long as the reservation has at least one female on it, this will be visible.
Not sure if its good / bad, safe / unsafe but suddenly noticed this on IndiGo seat selection. Calling out "Occupied by Female" for some seats. pic.twitter.com/fS6IBAAHBe
— Khabri Lal (@khabri_lal) May 28, 2024
Here’s how IndiGo describes the change:
IndiGo is proud to announce the introduction of a new feature that aims to make the travel experience more comfortable for our female passengers. This has been introduced basis market research, and is currently in pilot mode aligning with our #GirlPower ethos. The feature offers visibility of seats booked by female passengers, only during web check-in. It is specifically tailored to PNRs with women travellers – solo as well as part of family bookings. 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.
The backdrop here is that some men cannot keep their hands to themselves. That may be a problem in many parts of the world, but seems to be a serious problem in India:
Almost one in three (31%) women in India have faced physical or sexual violence, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). Gender-based violence is a more common cause of ill health among women than traffic accidents and malaria combined.
Is This Reasonable?
I’m not able to culturally speak to this situation, so I have no opinion on whether this is reasonable or not (I’d love to hear some thoughts from my many readers in India). I do think it would not fly in the USA, but I also note that there are female-only gyms or gym nights all over Germany, which also struck me as odd when I lived there.
Without any background on the frequency of unwanted touching or even conversation is occurring now on IndiGo flights, it is hard to say whether this is a reasonable change or just woke pandering (that is probably offensive to those who believe that gender is simply a social construct).
A determined man could simply book a ticket as a female (or identify as a female) to scope out the cabin…is it really all that helpful to provide such transparency rather than just require every passenger to treat one another with respect and dignity?
CONCLUSION
IndiGo now lets female passengers see where other females are seated onboard in an effort to provide an “unparalleled travel experience for all our passengers.” It isn’t clear if a specific incident prompted this or if this represents a tool to address a perceived cultural problem.
image: IndiGo
I flew LHR-DOH-CPT on Qatar a few years ago on QR. I had been scheduled on LHR-CPT, but that changed unexpectedly when the UK suspended RSA flights at the beginning of Omicron.
Anyway, the change was quite sudden and I was seated next to a woman who wore a headscarf. The FA asked her if she wanted to be seated next to a woman. I get that there are sensivitities and was not offended. The passenger declined. But stories abound about men on El Al wanting to avoid sitting next to women. I experienced what I assume was an Islamic preference, and perhaps IndiGo senses that its female passengers have preferences as well.
I would say no, not creepy.
This idea seems to be derivative from law enforcement making male detainees look toward the wall when females walk by.
I think that most passengers, men and women, would prefer a female seatmate, because (on average) females are smaller and there would be more room.
Indian men are notorious for their creepyness towards women.
Where is their DEI department? How about if the male guy happens to be identifying him as a zebra that day?
What a stupid and uselss comment. Par for the course.
Says the guy who thinks it’s normal to stick his d#ck in another man’s ass.
Again, I ignore you until you insult other good people. Which is all you ever do here. Shows how insecure you are about your abnormal behaviors.
Given what your wrote, it seems like you really have a thing for descriptive graphic homoerotic sexual relations between men. Would you make all your grandparents proud with your graphic sexual commentary? Either way, didn’t anyone teach you that two wrongs don’t make a right even if you see wrong?
And my belief is homosexual behavior is wrong and against nature. Not from a religious standpoint but from a natural evolution view. Period.
As for my grandfather, I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to see the acceptance of these freaks by 30-40% of society.
As for Aaron, the guy is the most hateful person on this site and I have no problem going low like his does to call it out. Sometimes 2 wrongs do make a point.
Dave, your sexual desires with men can be seen from afar.
Generally people are very homophobic due to an unresolved internal conflict.
“Wrongs” things leave you horny, apparently.
It’s okay, just be happy.
Life is short.
A competent student of India government would realize that India is ruled by a far right wing government and that the country isn’t all that into DEI. The country has actually been gaming and slashing the Indian version of DEI as part of its majoritarianism play and doing so as the expense of minorities, other underrepresented communities and those who don’t kiss up to the government. This has been going on for decades now but has been supercharged since Manmohan Singh lost the Prime Ministership to Modi.
I have lived in India. And on a personal and professional level, I have good things to say about Manmohan Singh and Vajpayee. The same cannot be said by me of gunda Modi and gunda Shah who are basically free riding on what Manmohan Singh, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh did, on “the American boost” to counter China, and on the educational infrastructure system put in place by Nehru.
Far from your finest hour with such a comment: completely irrelevant and juvenile. You’re better than this.
“A determined man could simply book a ticket as a female (or identify as a female) to scope out the cabin…”
Yeah…just try this in India and see how far you get.
I don’t know the backstory here. It could be a genuine safety concern, or it could just be a marketing gimmick to curry favor with those from more socially conservative communities that are still uncomfortable sitting next to someone of the opposite sex that aren’t family members. I suspect the latter personally.
If you’re as well-traveled in India by air as I am, by now you should have noticed that Hijras travel by plane too. Hijras are very much a part of India in a very traditional sense.
I’ve been to India for business. The building where I had to go to had separate entrances and lanes for female workers. It was also normal for female employees to start and finish their workday at slightly different times than the men (+- 15 minutes for example). When I asked about this I was told that sexual harassment, even assault, is a very common problem in India.
Sexual harassment and sexual assault are a problem all across Indian public places and places of employment. I have long suspected that the hierarchical culture of having servants and of the socio-economic stratification via the caste system and communalism explains a lot about why women in India have to be so extraordinarily concerned about the risk of sexual harassment and assault. But these crimes that used to largely spare upper middle class and upper class women in the country no longer do and yet even the ruling class don’t really take seriously the cultural rot having gotten even worse in the last ten years (but also ever since the consumption of online porn skyrocketed in India as a result of mobile phone service democratization in the country).
“Mother India” doesn’t do enough to protect its mothers and daughters from out of control men in the country. The responsibility to fix this mess is on men and parents to not spoil and favor the boys and to take seriously respect for the bodily integrity of all women and girls regardless of the background of the women and girls.
This is not a great solution, but an act of desperation to try to do something to protect females. What India really needs is to have the authorities and right-wing cultural leaders take all sexual assault far more seriously in practice when it comes to criminal prosecution and sentencing of the men who actually did the sexual assaults. But unfortunately there are so many thugs nowadays as legislators and thugs in the two highest offices of the country that there is a very broken system of law enforcement, of prosecution, of sentencing criminals and thus a lot of men in the country think they can get away with impunity for engaging in sexual harassment and sexual assault depending on the background of the target and the willingness of the authorities to misdirect the investigation to pin the crime on innocents from disadvantaged communities.
Hopefully the airline and authorities don’t blame the female victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault when it happens to those who don’t select seats to avoid being seated next to unrelated males.
If you want a real good sense of how messed up India is with regard to respecting women and girls as equal people deserving of respect like they would give their own mother, you should fly into and out of secondary Indian cities and get a grasp of what the baggage handlers and security guys say in the local (non-English) Indian languages when talking about European and European-American women that aren’t seen as elderly. It’s really disgusting talk way too often and done right in the open without any sense of shame. I love the sound of “Jai Hind”, but everyone needs to say “hai, hai Bharat” when this kind of misogyny and sexually hostile environment is so very prevalent across the country. It used to be primarily a North Indian and Hindi-belt problem — but it’s awful in the South and East too.
What sort of things are said?
The kind of graphic language that I don’t dare to repeat, but it is evidence of porn-damaged men who don’t respect the idea of informed consent to engage in sexual relations and whose choice of porn and related attitudes is skewed toward porn from Europe and the Americas. Let’s keep in mind that India still doesn’t take spousal rape seriously. That in itself is a big part of the problem because they think men should be able to do what they wish to women as long as they can get away with it. This is a problem all across what was British India.
Is this feature for the real women out there or the fake wannabes with penises and stubble?
India’s traditional Hijra community members do get sexually harassed and even sexually assaulted by CIS men in India, but they don’t constitute much demand for protection from lechers. People tend to care more about their female family members than unrelated Hijras or those otherwise perceived as part of the LGBTQ+ identities.
When we were in India about 10 years ago, they also had subway cars that were only for women so that they didn’t have to deal with being groped in a crowded space.
Of the Indian women in my social circles who are between the ages of 20 and 55 or so and have lived in Delhi or other North Indian cities, nearly every single one who used public transport often during rush hour has some history of being groped or explicitly sexually harassed while using public transport. And some of these people are very used to taking crowded subways in the US and Europe and never experienced such low life behavior.
….. except in India,
Thanks GUWonder for your interesting, albeit somewhat saddening, insight. I adore India, have visited many times, though have never lived there, and I wish this issue of treating women as second class citizens did not exist.
As messy as it is. I adore India too. And that is why I find the systemic problems there so very concerning. And I am from the school of acknowledging and addressing the problems rather than pretending as if things are good enough and everything is better than ever.
One of the key reasons there are so many more women driving in India nowadays is not just because of a growth in prosperity, a widening of the middle class and access to credit. It’s also because families are making a greater financial sacrifice to try to protect their daughters from the humiliating misogyny and risk of sexual violence that comes from using mass transit, taxis, shared vans/minibuses and the like in India.
The very women who would fearlessly ride the city buses in Delhi during the 1950s and 1960s to go see movies in the evenings now greatly worry for their daughters and granddaughters and wouldn’t advise them to do the same.
This reminds me of an episode of The Amazing Race where the contestants were standing in a packed train in India. On camera, a female contestant mentioned she was being touched inappropriately.
Can male passengers not have a preference too? I would rather sit next to a man of my own age than a whining, whinging teenage girl.