BANGALORE: The Kingfisher Airlines flight cancellations spree continues.
A day after cancelling flights from Delhi and Mumbai, the debt-ridden private airline on Sunday cancelled as many as 13 flights from Bangalore without prior intimation, thus throwing the tour plans of hundreds of passengers haywire.
As if this was not enough, the private airline, which has been in the news for all the wrong reasons since November 2010, has also cancelled about 80 flights pan India.
Though KF has maintained in their statement on Saturday that their flight disruptions were due to ‘unexpected events’, including bird strikes, passengers at the Bangalore International Airport were unduly caught up in the middle.
Distraught passengers were seen pleading with the airlines’ staff over alternative arrangements.
Though the airline has refused to confirm the total cancellations on Sunday, sources add that the number was as high as 13 from the city and over 25 flights from Mumbai and Delhi.
“I have been waiting here for over two hours, but I haven’t got any response from any of the ground staff members,” said Kalyani, a passenger who was to board a KF flight at 10 am.
While a lot of passengers had to wait on the phone for hours to complain to the centralised customer care, a lucky few were accommodated on other flights without a ‘fight’.
“I was to board a KF flight to Mumbai in the morning.
After pestering them for hours, they put me onto a KF flight at 3.30 pm,” said Kishore Jagadish, a passenger travelling to Delhi.
Passengers were either seen venting haplessly to ground staff or taking this to the social networking platform.
One Ronit Baugh, posted on Kingfisher’s Facebook page: “Kingfisher Airlines cancelled my flight twice in one day.
They need to address important things like informing passengers about cancellations.
The lousy customer care takes 51 minutes to answer a stranded passenger’s call and the ground staff at the airport yells back at desperate fliers”.
The airline had earlier stated that they were able to operate 208 out of the 240 scheduled flights daily and denied they were reducing their flight frequencies and that ‘normalcy’ would resume in “four days”.