MMarket ResearchIndia

Industry expertise

Aviation & Airports market research in India

Passenger experience and demand research for airlines and airports.

See case studies

Quick answer

Market Research India is a specialist aviation & airports research consultancy in India. We interview passengers, travel agents, corporate travellers in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia and English, with field teams in 50 cities and 4 methods matched to how this sector actually buys.

  • Proposal in 24 hours

    Scoped, itemised and fixed-fee.

  • 50 cities, 14 languages

    Our own supervised field teams.

  • Senior-led, NDA-first

    A research director on every project.

2,400+

Projects delivered

50

Cities with field teams

30

Industries covered

14

Indian languages

01

The decisions we help you make

Indian air travel is price-led at booking and service-led at recall, which is why loyalty programmes struggle against a visible fare difference. Increasingly the airport experience, not the cabin, is where the brand is formed.

  • What do passengers value most?

  • How do flyers choose an airline?

  • Which routes have unmet demand?

  • What fare premium, if any, will this route actually bear for a better schedule?

  • Which touchpoint — booking, bag drop, delay handling — does most damage to repeat choice?

Each of these is a decision with a cost attached, which is why we design backwards from them rather than forwards from a questionnaire.

02

Who we talk to, and how we reach them

Who you talk to decides what the study can conclude. We treat each audience as a separate recruitment problem rather than as quotas in one sample.

  • Passengers

    Intercepted airside and landside with airport permission and recruited from verified flyer panels, screened on trips in the last twelve months, route type and booking channel.

  • Travel agents

    Sampled from IATA and consolidator frames, screened on monthly ticketing volume and the leisure-versus-corporate mix.

  • Corporate travellers

    Recruited at companies with meaningful air spend, screened on trips per year, policy constraints and whether they choose the carrier or accept what is booked for them.

Interviews run in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia and English, with every questionnaire translated and back-translated before fieldwork. Moderators and interviewers are briefed on the aviation & airports category itself, not handed a script — which is the difference between a respondent answering politely and a respondent explaining themselves.

04

What a typical study looks like

This is what a mid-sized study in this sector usually looks like. Smaller qualitative reads and larger tracking programmes scale from here.

Indicative scope — aviation & airports study

Typical sample
n=1,200 passengers across 5 airports spanning metro and regional routes, 40 agent interviews and 30 corporate-traveller depths
Who we interview
Passengers, Travel agents, Corporate travellers — each recruited against a separate screener rather than drawn from one general sample.
Core methods
Customer Satisfaction & NPS, Pricing Research, Market Sizing & Forecasting, Mystery Shopping
Fieldwork window
4–5 weeks, spanning weekday business and weekend leisure traffic
Standard deliverables
NPS dashboard, Driver analysis, Action plans, Optimal price range
Signature output
A route-level willingness-to-pay and touchpoint priority map
Lead time
7–9 weeks from sign-off to debrief

05

Compliance, ethics and data quality

Research in this sector carries obligations that a generic fieldwork house will not have thought about. These are the ones we build into the protocol before the first interview is scheduled.

  • Airport rules come first

    Intercepts run only with airport and security permission, in designated areas, and never in security queues or at a gate during final call.

  • No security-sensitive detail

    We do not collect, record or report anything relating to security procedure, staffing or screening performance.

  • Disruption handled sensitively

    Passengers caught in a delay or cancellation are not asked about satisfaction in the moment; we re-contact them after the journey.

  • Verification you can audit

    Every passenger and corporate traveller we count is screened against a written definition, de-duplicated, GPS- and timestamp-logged in the field, and re-contacted on a 10% back-check with 10% of audio audited by a supervisor who did not run the interview.

What we will not do on a aviation & airports study

We will not substitute an audience without telling you, quietly loosen a screener to hit a quota, interview anyone who has not understood what they are consenting to, or move identifiable personal data outside India without your written agreement. If the fieldwork cannot be done properly, we say so at proposal stage rather than at debrief.

How we work

Our research process

  1. 01

    Discovery

    We turn your business question into clear research objectives.

  2. 02

    Design

    Sampling, method, questionnaire and discussion guides, translated into local languages.

  3. 03

    Fieldwork

    Supervised field teams with GPS, audio and back-check quality control.

  4. 04

    Analysis

    Statistical and thematic analysis by senior researchers.

  5. 05

    Insight

    Board-ready reports, dashboards and workshops with clear recommendations.

Before you brief us

Frequently asked questions

What does a aviation & airports research project cost in India?

Cost follows the sample, the seniority of the audience and the number of cities. Reaching passengers costs a fraction of what it costs to reach corporate travellers, so the audience mix moves the number far more than the headline interview count. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

Which cities should a aviation & airports study cover?

Start where the sector concentrates — Gurugram, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Chennai — then add markets that match your distribution rather than the national map. Most clients run four to eight cities so results can be compared side by side.

How do you make sure respondents are genuinely travel agents?

Each audience has its own written screener and its own frame. Respondents are de-duplicated against past projects, fieldwork is GPS- and timestamp-logged, 10% are re-contacted on a back-check and 10% of audio is audited by a supervisor who did not conduct the interview.

How long does a aviation & airports study take?

Fieldwork of the scope described above runs 4–5 weeks, spanning weekday business and weekend leisure traffic, and the whole project is typically 7–9 weeks from sign-off to debrief. Fieldwork usually begins five to seven working days after sign-off, once screeners and translations are approved.

Which methods suit aviation & airports research best?

For this sector we most often use customer satisfaction & nps, pricing research, market sizing & forecasting, mystery shopping. The right combination depends on whether you need to size something, explain it or test it — a brief that names the decision gets a sharper design than one that names a method.

What safeguards apply to aviation & airports fieldwork?

Intercepts run only with airport and security permission, in designated areas, and never in security queues or at a gate during final call. Alongside that, all personal data is collected on informed consent, held in India, pseudonymised before analysis and deleted on an agreed schedule, in line with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the ESOMAR code.

Request a proposal

Tell us the aviation & airports decision you are facing and we will scope it.

Sector at a glance

Hub cities
1
Audiences covered
3
Fieldwork window
4–5 weeks
Lead time
7–9 weeks
Proposal
Within 24 hours
See related case studies

Keep exploring

Aviation & Airports research, city by city and method by method

Fifty cities, twenty methods and the sectors that sit closest to aviation & airports. Each page is written for that specific combination of market and approach.

Tier 1 metros

8

Full-scale quantitative fieldwork, viewing-facility groups and senior aviation & airports interviews in the eight largest markets.

Sectors that sit next to this one

4

These most often appear in the same programme as a aviation & airports study, either as an adjacent market or a shared audience.

Next step

Make your next aviation & airports decision with evidence.

Powered byIRPR