Resumption of flights: It's chaos for passengers

Most of the complaints are from Air India passengers

Nishant Pitti

Imagine traveling all the way from Meerut to the Delhi airport, and as you near the destination, you get a message that flight has been cancelled. You frantically call the customer care, but no one responds.

Scores of passengers went through similar harrowing experience on May 25.

The resumption of flights from May 25 has caused a lot of chaos for the passengers. The problem for passengers began with individual states rolling out their guidelines relating to airport operations and post travel quarantine rules that left travellers high and dry.

With only a fraction of flights allowed to operate from some of the busiest airports, it resulted in a spike in cancellations with majority travellers left uncertain of their travel.

To add to this, the ability of Air India to manage the current situation has added to the angst of passengers. Air India was the last airline to inform passengers regarding cancellation of their flights.

Many passengers reached airports as Air India had sent SMS to customers at 1:30 am, but failed to make changes on their website. The flights, which were cancelled, were still showing confirmed on their website.

Air India should outsource their operations to a private carrier for three months if they want to avoid such blunders.

Air India currently has the most complex and time consuming policy for refunds among all airlines. They ask agents to file a refund application form, which is a manual process. These forms are manually verified by their team after 45-60 days and then are approved or rejected.

Earlier it used to be an automated process but now it has been moved to a manual process. With the world moving towards automation, Air India is moving in an opposite direction and because of these manual processes it will be very difficult to promote our national carrier, as we are having a surge in calls/email/chat support in our back office due to state-wise policy to handle domestic passengers.

Nishant Pitti is CEO, EaseMyTrip.com

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