Chennai: Flight cancellations continue, AI flyers worst hit

CHENNAI: Flight cancellations because of trimming of the schedules continued to affect domestic passengers at Chennai airport on Wednesday. The airport handled 44 flights, 22 arrivals and 22 departures, the highest after services resumed on Monday.
Though passengers who booked tickets on all airlines are suffering because of cancellations, those who booked on Air India are hit the worst.
The airline is operating only one flight a day though it had listed around five daily flights in the schedule released by the ministry of civil aviation for flights from May 25 to June 30.
Air India flew one flight to Delhi on Monday, one flight to Port Blair on Tuesday and one flight to Delhi on Wednesday. It will operate a flight to Port Blair on Thursday.
As the number of flights are low, passengers who had tickets on cancelled flights are not able to reschedule their trip to another day. The airline is also not issuing refunds instead it has said that people will be able to use the tickets to fly any time till August. This has made many to take to social media to complain. But the airline is giving a standard response advising them to write a mail.
EaseMyTrip CEO Nishant Pitti said, “Inability of Air India to manage the current situation has added to the angst of passengers with the airline receiving highest complaints even with least number of domestic flights. Over 70% of the complaints received today on EaseMyTrip.com’s customer care is regarding Air India alone.” He said, “Additionally, when all other airlines sales and back office teams are ensuring that proper support is provided 24x7, Air India personnel are is not even taking calls post 6pm.”
Air India currently has the most complex and time-consuming policy for refund, sespecially when it comes to tickets booked through agents. They ask agents to file a refund application form that 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.
An Air India official said that the number of flights is low because they were not getting slots at the airport. IndiGo and AirAsia passengers have started getting refunds for tickets booked through agents or online sites as they have started releasing money which was earlier held back in credit shell.