Cheap, not better

KOLKATA: Flying has got cheaper. But a cheap ticket is no guarantee that you get to fly at all. A seven-member wedding party learnt this the hard way on Sunday. All of them, including the groom who is to take his vows on Monday, were thrown out of an Agartala-bound Air Deccan flight (DN 675) minutes before takeoff due to an error in the airline’s newly-installed reservation system.
Groom Dipten Chatterjee, his father Debashish, and five other family members — Subhashish Chatterjee, Somanth Chakraborty, Dr K D Banerjee,Kunal Banerjee and Debjani Chatterjee — checked in on time, were issued boarding passes and had settled down in their respective seats when they were asked to leave the aircraft.When the passengers argued, the staff threatened to call police and throw them out by force.
"An airline staff approached us and said that our tickets were not valid as they had been cancelled by the travel agent. They had issued the boarding passes based on an e-ticket that the airline later claimed was erroneous," said Debashish Chatterjee, a Nagpur resident.
Though Air Deccan officials insisted that the travel agent (New Delhi-based Go In Air) was at fault, facts reveal otherwise. The party, originally a nine-member one, had cancelled only two tickets.
"The two tickets cancelled against PNR DAO 7216304 shows in the records.We have a printout where the other seven tickets have confirmed status. Though the airline is retracting now, the boarding passes were issued because the system showed the same status," said Dipten. The MNC executive, who works in Delhi, had booked the tickets through the official travel agent.
An airport official later told TOI that the airline’s passenger reservation system had been out of order for the past four days, leading to errors. "They realised there was a problem when 187 boarding passes were issued for the 180-seater flight," he said.
While an Air Deccan spokesperson conceded that there could be a few "teething problems" because of the switchover to a new reservation system, the wedding party has been left stranded. While Dipten managed to board an Indian flight later in the evening, the others will have to take a flight on Monday.
Debashish plans to file a complaint with the airport police and a petition with the Consumer Redressal Forum once his son’s wedding is over.