Second wave: Passengers allege airlines refuse to help even when they test positive for Covid

Social media pages of a majority of the airlines are filled with complaints by disgruntled passengers as they ask for a refund either because they do not want to travel due to safety reasons or are forced to be home as they are getting treated for Covid-19 or due to their destination city announcing lockdown.

As the country grapples with the impact of the second wave of Covid-19 and citizens choose to stay indoors, those who had booked flights are facing issues around cancellations and ticket refunds. To add to the misery, passengers testing positive for Covid-19 before their travel date are not being exempted from cancellation charges.

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Social media pages of a majority of the airlines are filled with complaints by disgruntled passengers as they ask for a refund either because they do not want to travel due to safety reasons or are forced to be home as they are getting treated for Covid-19 or due to their destination city announcing lockdown.

Divya Mehta, a Delhi resident whose family tested positive, said that of the total ₹47,000 that they spent in booking their tickets, SpiceJet has charged them ₹30,000 as cancellation fees. Mehta said, “We were booked to fly from Delhi to Goa on April 30, but our family is currently fighting against Covid. My uncle lost his battle to the virus and my aunt is critical. How can we even step out of our homes in such a situation? We are paying heavy daily hospital charges, and our ticket refund amount means a lot to us at the moment.”

According to Mehta, she has approached the airline multiple times via emails only to get their automated response. “I even tweeted our positive RT-PCR reports as proof, but the airline has not bothered to solve the issue. All they do is ask me to share details.”

SpiceJet did not comment on the matter.

Similar situation has been faced by other passengers too.

A tweet to IndiGo by a passenger, Raman Jaiswal, read, “Hi @paytm @IndiGo6E I have a flight on 19th May..due to pandemic we can’t travel. As I wish to cancel the flight, I am getting only ₹553 refund. Kindly help me out.” While responding to Jaiswal, IndiGo’s tweet read, “Sir, we are monitoring the situation closely. As of now, we are not offering any waivers. Upon changes or cancellation, necessary charges will be applicable.”

Saurabh Jain, a Chartered Accountant from Malad, was told that his RT-PCR test reports and his wife’s blood test reports were not good proofs for being medically unfit. Jain, who was to travel to Jaipur via a GoAir flight on April 25, wrote to the airline first on April 19 and then after his wife’s blood reports were out.

“Due to rise in cases, RT-PCR tests are on waiting, and hence we did not get an appointment for my wife before a week. Hence, we went for blood tests to check if she too had been infected along with me. The blood reports made it clear that she was positive and that is when I wrote to the airline for the second time, attaching both our reports. However, the airline’s response to my email was that our reports weren’t enough to prove that we were Covid positive,” Jain said.

He added, “I am shocked at the apathy of these airlines to people like us who are fighting against the virus and have to go through such harassment. I joined Twitter only to get a response from them as they stopped replying to me for three days. It’s a shame that people have to approach the airlines in social media in order to get them talking to us. What about those who cannot access or who do not know to operate social media accounts?”

GoAir did not comment on this matter.

Another passenger said she had to face refund issues. Panvel resident Nasreen Dada, who was to fly with her two children on Sunday, had to approach her personal contacts and pressure the airline to get her money back.

She had booked a ticket for GoAir’s G8 330 which is the only non-stop flight between Mumbai and Kannur. Not only did the flight get cancelled three consecutive times, the airline also asked passengers to cancel the ticket from their end and refused to refund them.

“I wanted to travel with my kids to see my mother who is alone in Kannur, but the airline has been cancelling the flight since Sunday. Hence we decided to ask them to cancel our tickets and refund. However, we could only get our money back only when we approached a few resourceful people and also by fighting with the airline for it.”

When contacted, GoAir spokesperson said, “There have been flight cancellations on the domestic route which were connecting flights to the onward travel to Dubai and Sharjah as part of the travel embargo to Dubai and Sharjah. GoAir regrets any convenience caused to our esteemed customers.”

Passengers said airlines should encourage people wanting to stay home at times when the country is seeing the fastest spread of Covid-19 virus, instead they are only trying to take advantage of the situation.

GoAir, however, has been cancelling flights on other sectors too. According to the complaints on the airline’s Twitter account, it cancelled flights that included ones from Ahmedabad to Varanasi, Pune to Kolkata, Pune to Ahmedabad, Delhi to Varanasi among others.