
Industry expertise
Aviation & Airports market research in India
Passenger experience and demand research for airlines and airports.
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.
03
Methods that fit this sector
Method should follow the market, not the other way round. These are the approaches that fit how this sector actually behaves.
Quantitative
Customer Satisfaction & NPS
Touchpoint CSAT and NPS from booking to baggage, measured close to where the experience happened.
ViewStrategy
Pricing Research
Route-level willingness to pay, tested across schedule, baggage and seat trade-offs.
ViewStrategy
Market Sizing & Forecasting
Route demand and unserved city-pair analysis built bottom-up from traffic and catchment data.
ViewSpecialist
Mystery Shopping
Call-centre, check-in and lounge audits against the published service standard.
View
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
How we work
Our research process
- 01
Discovery
We turn your business question into clear research objectives.
- 02
Design
Sampling, method, questionnaire and discussion guides, translated into local languages.
- 03
Fieldwork
Supervised field teams with GPS, audio and back-check quality control.
- 04
Analysis
Statistical and thematic analysis by senior researchers.
- 05
Insight
Board-ready reports, dashboards and workshops with clear recommendations.
Where the sector concentrates
The Indian cities that matter most for aviation & airports
Aviation & airports is concentrated rather than spread: one city carries most of the sector's weight, so we start there and add the metros that supply the rest of the demand. Each page covers aviation & airports research in that city specifically.
Tier 2 · Haryana
Gurugram
A corporate hub hosting many MNC headquarters and India's auto industry.
ViewTier 1 · Maharashtra
Mumbai
India's financial capital and headquarters city for most FMCG, BFSI and media companies.
ViewTier 1 · Delhi
Delhi NCR
The national capital region, a vast and diverse consumer market and India's policy hub.
ViewTier 1 · Karnataka
Bangalore
India's startup and technology capital, home to global capability centres and digital-first consumers.
ViewTier 1 · Tamil Nadu
Chennai
The 'Detroit of India', a manufacturing and healthcare powerhouse on the east coast.
ViewTier 1 · Telangana
Hyderabad
A life-sciences and technology hub, often called the pharma capital of India.
ViewTier 1 · West Bengal
Kolkata
The commercial gateway to East and Northeast India with a strong trading heritage.
ViewTier 1 · Maharashtra
Pune
An automotive and IT cluster with one of India's largest student populations.
View
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.
Sector at a glance
- Hub cities
- 1
- Audiences covered
- 3
- Fieldwork window
- 4–5 weeks
- Lead time
- 7–9 weeks
- Proposal
- Within 24 hours
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
8Full-scale quantitative fieldwork, viewing-facility groups and senior aviation & airports interviews in the eight largest markets.
Tier 2 growth markets
42Forty-two cities where aviation & airports demand is forming fastest, each covered by a supervised local field team.
By research method
20Every one of our twenty methods, written for the aviation & airports audience rather than in general.
- Consumer Researchquantitative
- B2B Market Researchstrategy
- Focus Group Discussionsqualitative
- In-Depth Interviewsqualitative
- Quantitative Surveysquantitative
- CATI Telephone Surveysquantitative
- Online Surveysquantitative
- Mystery Shoppingspecialist
Show 12 more
- Market Feasibility Studiesstrategy
- Competitor Analysisstrategy
- Brand Health Trackingquantitative
- Customer Satisfaction & NPSquantitative
- Product & Concept Testingquantitative
- Pricing Researchstrategy
- Market Sizing & Forecastingstrategy
- Ethnographic Researchqualitative
- Healthcare Market Researchspecialist
- Retail Audit & Distributionspecialist
- Usage & Attitude Studiesquantitative
- Advertising & Media Researchquantitative
Sectors that sit next to this one
4These most often appear in the same programme as a aviation & airports study, either as an adjacent market or a shared audience.
All other industries
25The rest of the thirty sectors we hold dedicated field and analysis experience in.
- FMCG
- Healthcare
- Pharmaceuticals
- Banking & Financial Services
- Insurance
- Automotive
- Electric Vehicles
- Real Estate
Show 17 more
- Education & EdTech
- Retail
- E-commerce & Quick Commerce
- Telecom
- Information Technology & SaaS
- Energy & Renewables
- Agriculture & Agritech
- Manufacturing & Industrial
- Food & Beverage
- Consumer Durables & Electronics
- Fashion & Apparel
- Media & Entertainment
- Chemicals & Specialty Materials
- Beauty & Personal Care
- Fintech
- Gaming & Esports
- Medical Devices
Next step
Make your next aviation & airports decision with evidence.