The recent mayhem around Indigo Airlines and the widespread cancellation of flights across airports has been a reminder of how fragile travel plans really are. What starts as a routine itinerary can unravel within hours, often without a clear explanation that helps in real time. Flights disappear from schedules, notifications arrive late or not at all, and airport terminals fill with people trying to solve the same problem at once. From a distance, this looks like a logistical issue. When it happens to you, it feels more like a suspension of control. Travel in India, especially around holidays, already carries uncertainty, but incidents like this compress that uncertainty into a single, disruptive moment.
What makes these situations harder is their unpredictability. Weather disruptions, operational constraints, staff shortages, or cascading delays rarely follow a pattern that can be planned around. Even when reasons are given, they do not translate into actionable decisions for passengers. Rebooking options vanish quickly, customer support lines get overwhelmed, and alternate flights become prohibitively expensive. With IndiGo Airlines operating at such scale, any disruption ripples across multiple airports at once. The system is efficient when it works, and brittle when it does not. There is very little middle ground.
This unpredictability has a direct effect on how holidays are planned, or increasingly, how they are not planned. Time off from work is finite, hotel bookings are fixed, and family schedules are coordinated weeks in advance. A cancelled flight can invalidate all of that in one step. It is not just the loss of money or time, but the erosion of confidence in the plan itself. Once a journey is disrupted at the starting point, everything downstream becomes provisional. The idea of a holiday as a clean break starts to feel unrealistic. Instead, travel becomes another variable to manage, rather than a pause from management.
Over time, this shifts expectations. Instead of looking forward to travel with a sense of certainty, there is a background assumption that something may go wrong. That assumption changes behavior. Buffers are added, commitments are softened, and emotional investment is reduced. Keeping expectations low is not pessimism so much as adaptation. It is a way of protecting mental space in a system that does not offer guarantees. Hoping for the best becomes less about optimism and more about accepting limited influence over outcomes.
Writing this down feels like a small adjustment in mindset rather than a complaint. These disruptions are not always preventable, and they are rarely personal. The best response seems to be a combination of flexibility and restraint. Make plans, but do not anchor too much meaning to their exact shape. Prepare for alternatives without obsessing over them. Travel will continue to be part of life, and so will its failures. Keeping expectations low and hoping for the best is not resignation. It is a practical posture in an environment where certainty is no longer a given.