Bangalore:
Red-faced after its passengers were stranded at the Bangalore International Airport (BIAL) for six hours on Saturday, Jet Airways has announced ticket refunds.
Flight 9W486, scheduled to take off for Chennai at 5 pm, was delayed for over six hours, and then finally cancelled at 11 pm without prior notice to the 90 stranded fliers.
"Passengers can avail refunds on their tickets at our registration desk. We'll try to avoid such complications in future," said Pavitra, an attendant with the airline. Many people however, had to cancel business assignments and weekend plans because of the cancellation.
According to the airlines, the flight was apparently delayed because of 'technical snag', and failure to inform the stranded passengers led to an uncertain wait throughout the night for them.
"We were issued boarding passes at 5 pm on Saturday and till about 11 pm we didn't know what was happening."
They announced that the flight had been delayed and kept us waiting all night. At 10.30 am yesterday morning, a few passengers were provided seats on a different carrier," lamented Tyagarajan, an entrepreneur from the city.
When contacted, a Jet Airways flight attendant claimed that they did not inform passengers of the cancellation because they themselves were unaware about it.
"There was an oil leakage and the engineering department had been working on it for six hours," claimed Jet Airways employee Abhijeet.
Many passengers, who had to take connecting international flights from Chennai, were delayed and missed their flights. "Our family had to take a flight to Singapore, but because of the delay we missed our flight.
We urged Jet Airways authorities to either compensate our loss or put us on another flight. But they haven't reverted back yet," claimed S Manine, a passenger.
Around 14 passengers, who were to take a connecting flight to Kuala Lumpur, were put on a Kingfisher flight to Mumbai, from where they took the connecting flight.