Vivek Gambhir, who is a venture partner at Lightspeed India, has called out IndiGo over what the airline described as a “gesture of care”. Gambhir’s LinkedIn followed an apology email sent by the airline, in which he highlighted the fine print attached to the travel voucher, complete with terms and conditions.
‘When apology comes with waiver’
“When an apology comes with a waiver,” said Gambhir in a post on LinkedIn. He said the email he received from IndiGo carried the subject line “IndiGo’s gesture of care”.
Gambhir noted that the email started on a positive note and had phrases such as “truly sorry” and “deeply regret the inconvenience” caused by flight cancellations.
“We are truly sorry for the disruption of your IndiGo flight… We recognise how much this has affected your schedule and deeply regret the inconvenience. Your trust is important to us, and we are committed to ensuring a positive resolution,” the email stated at the outset.
It added, “As a gesture of care and with our sincere apologies, we would like to humbly offer you 02 single-use IndiGo travel vouchers worth INR 5,000 each,” followed by a link and the applicable terms and conditions of the voucher.
‘This undid everything that came before it’
The business executive said that up to this point, the message felt different, like “something has shifted”. However, he said that the “mood reversed” when he reached the last paragraph.
“Your choice to accept the voucher below shall constitute your consent to a full and final settlement of any / all of your claims, demands and liabilities, whether present or future … You acknowledge and agree that upon receipt of the travel voucher, you agree to waive any and all your rights to seek any additional remedies,” the last paragraph of the email, per the screenshot he shared, read.
According to Gambhir, this clause “undid everything that came before it”, revealing how “care became conditional, and regret turned transactional”.
‘Sympathy packaged with legal closure’
“The subtext reads clearly: We are sorry. But only to the extent that this goes no further. That is why this feels so jarring,” he went on to express.
He added that the contradiction was hard to ignore. “You cannot tell a customer ‘your trust matters’ while simultaneously asking them to surrender their right to future recourse. One sentence reaches out emotionally. The next pulls back defensively. The contradiction is hard to miss.”
In the next few lines, he said that this very paragraph in the email “explained why empathy proved so difficult for IndiGo”, adding, “The airline runs on precision. Predictable processes. Clean endings. Loose threads create discomfort. Emotional ambiguity feels unresolved. Even remorse needs a boundary. In such a system, an apology becomes a transaction. Something offered, accepted, and concluded. Once the box is ticked, everyone moves on.”
Gambhir, who is based out of Delhi, said that customers often value acknowledgement over recompense. “They want the experience to be seen in full, without conditions attached. When regret arrives hand in hand with a waiver, it feels carefully measured rather than freely given.”
He emphasised that the issue was not the voucher amount, but the instinct to package “sympathy with legal closure”.
“IndiGo has built an impressive operation. Scale, efficiency and discipline deserve respect. Yet a company learns empathy only when it allows apologies to breathe, rather than rushing them to closure. For a brief moment, while reading that first paragraph, it felt like a heart was forming. Then the system stepped in. And the pulse faded,” he ended his long LinkedIn post on this note.
FinancialExpress.com has reached out to IndiGo for a response. It will be added as and when we receive one.
‘Working to make things right,’ says IndiGo
IndiGo, in a post on December 12, said that it was working “every moment” to make things right. “We would like to take a moment to let you know that our teams have been putting thoughtful care into both refund processing and compensation disbursal, and we want to keep you closely informed as these efforts continue,” the statement read.
The airline added that it would process all the refunds through December 2025. “Most of them have already been completed, and the remaining ones will reflect shortly. We are currently in the process of identifying flights where customers were severely impacted and stranded at the airports (on 3/4/5 December 2025). We will be reaching out to all such customers in January so that compensation can be extended smoothly.”
“We will be providing compensation which, in our current estimation, will be in excess of 500 crores to customers whose flights were cancelled within 24 hours of departure time and/or to customers severely stranded at certain airports,” it further stated.
In a separate press statement dated December 11, IndiGo said, “We will offer travel vouchers worth INR 10,000 to such severely impacted customers. These travel vouchers can be used for any future IndiGo journey for the next 12 months.”
