Flyers are at the receiving end of the bad financial situation at Jet Airways. Many have been getting messages about cancellations, sometimes a night before their flights. Passengers are being left on hold for 30 minutes or more just to get to an agent to reschedule their flights.
Jet Airways staff has been trying their best to accommodate passengers on other flights of their own airline. Jet Airways frontline staff on their aircraft is also, still serving with a smile, in spite of the fact that they don’t have the money rolling into their bank account themselves.If your flight is cancelled within 72 hours of departure, you should ideally call the airline, or if you can, visit the airline’s ticketing office, usually at the airport. But, if you get a cancellation for travel more than three days out, Jet Airways has opened up a separate website to get you accommodated on another flight if possible. Check here.
Till a few days ago, Jet Airways was accommodating displaced passengers, those whose flights were cancelled, on the flights of their peers such as Air India and Vistara. However, for various reasons, Vistara and Air India have stopped accepting the displaced passengers of Jet Airways at the moment, which means, if the airline is not able to get passengers a replacement ticket on their own plane, they are now issuing refunds to the passengers.
When booked directly, these refunds should reach your payment mode directly within a week to ten days. However, if you booked with a travel agent, the travel agent will issue you a refund.
However, Jet Airways is now facing incessant cancellations on their international routes, largely the regional operations which were flown on the Boeing 737s, but also some wide-bodies. This is potentially more costly to replace when Jet Airways cancels a sector. However, there are many potential ways to reduce the damage.
In many cases, when a domestic flight was cancelled, there was either an alternate routing available. But on international routes, there are not too many replacement flights. But Jet Airways still wants to help. They have been re-accommodating passengers on their partner airlines where possible.
For instance, flights from Abu Dhabi to Mumbai were cancelled overnight. However, Jet Airways would still be able to accommodate those passengers on their Dubai to Mumbai flight schedule. And just as an example, if a flight between Delhi and London is cancelled, they can also put passengers on their partner airline Virgin Atlantic. Here is a list of the partner airlines of Jet Airways.
The best way to get re-accommodated is to do some of the heavy lifting yourself. You can look at the partner airline list, and see if there is a flight available on the partner carriers. If that flight is available, you could write back or call back Jet Airways with the exact information, and they could try and rebook you on that flight. For instance, if you are booked for Delhi-Hong Kong on Jet Airways which is now cancelled, Jet Airways could book you on Hong Kong Airlines to bring you to Bangkok and then take you on a Jet Airways plane from there to Delhi.
And if you don’t seem to wait for a while on the phone to rebook yourself, you could always send a message to their Twitter team, who should be able to organise a call-back to get you re-accommodated.
It is only after exhausting all their possibilities will the airline cancel your ticket and offer you a full refund. To cover that risk, it is best that you buy travel insurance to cover the situation at the earliest.
Disclosure:
Vistara is one of the four launch partners of CNBCTV18.com.
Ajay Awtaney is a business travel & aviation journalist based in Mumbai, and the founder of the Indian frequent-traveller website Live From A Lounge (www.livefromalounge.com.) Ajay flies over 200,000 miles every year, and tweets about The Business of Travel at @LiveFromALounge.
First Published: Mar 22, 2019 1:50 PM IST
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