The credit corporate India leaves with the airlines

Every business ticket carries GST that the company can usually claim back. Across corporate India, that credit adds up to thousands of crores a year. A large share of it never reaches the books.

The reason is not that finance teams don't know the credit exists. It's that claiming it depends on thousands of small things going right: the traveller quoting the company's GSTIN, the airline issuing the invoice to the correct registration, the invoice reaching finance, the airline reporting it in its returns, and the claim being made before the deadline.

Each step is simple. Together, across dozens of airlines, many GSTINs and tens of thousands of tickets, they become a job that nobody in the finance function owns.

The credit is a legal entitlement. Losing it is a process failure, not a tax outcome.

Sizing the credit

We estimate corporate air spend in India at ₹50,000–65,000 crore a year. After allowing for the share of fares that attracts GST, the cabin mix, and travel that is not eligible, the claimable credit comes to roughly ₹2,500–3,800 crore every year.

Our client work suggests that many companies claim well under the full amount they are entitled to. Even a modest gap, applied to a pool of this size, leaves a very large sum with the airlines each year.

A growing market

The pool is growing. Deloitte estimates Indian corporate travel at $10.6 billion in 2023, doubling to $20.8 billion by FY2030. Domestic air traffic reached 1,677.4 lakh passengers in FY2026, up 1.4%, even as ICRA revised its outlook on Indian aviation to negative in March 2026.

More travel means more tickets, more invoices and more places for credit to go missing. Without a better process, the unclaimed amount grows with the market.

The new rate split

Since 22 September 2025, GST on air travel is 5% for economy and 18% for premium cabins. For finance teams, the cabin mix now has a large effect on how much credit is at stake. A premium ticket carries more than three times the GST of an economy ticket of the same value.

Where the credit leaks

A ticket has to pass six checkpoints before its GST becomes credit in the books. In our experience, the largest losses happen before finance even sees the invoice: at booking, when the company's GSTIN isn't given, and on the airline's portal, where invoices simply wait.

Why year-end clean-ups miss it

Most companies look at airline credit once a year, close to the deadline. By then, invoices are harder to get corrected, airlines have closed periods, and some tickets have fallen outside the time limit. The clean-up recovers some credit, but late and incompletely.

Moving from an annual exercise to monthly monitoring changes the result in two ways: credit is claimed in the right period, and problems are fixed while airlines can still correct them.

Five actions for CFOs

1. Put a number on itMeasure credit claimed against credit available, by GSTIN and airline. Most companies have never seen this number.
2. Fix the GSTIN at bookingMake the company GSTIN mandatory in every booking channel. It prevents the largest single source of loss.
3. Collect directly from airlinesDon't rely on agency reports. Pull invoices from airline portals for every registration.
4. Match every monthReconcile invoices to GSTR-2B monthly, and follow up with airlines while corrections are still possible.
5. Give it an ownerRecovery fails when it belongs to everyone. Assign it, inside the team or to a specialist firm, and measure the result.

Methodology and sources

General information only, not tax advice.