'Plane' confusion puts fliers in spot

Mumbai: What would you do if you think you have booked a seat on a full-service airline but find out-on boarding-that you have been put on a low-cost one?
About 140 passengers of Kingfisher Airlines' Mumbai-Guwahati flight faced this predicament on Sunday morning. They staged an impromptu protest, had an altercation with the cabin crew and eventually saw the airport security personnel being called into the aircraft to control the situation.
Eventually, the flight did take off without any untoward incident, but the confusion over whether it was a Kingfisher Class flight or a Kingfisher Red flight remained.
The passengers contended that they had booked a Kingfisher Class (KF Class) ticket and were flown on Kingfisher Red (KF Red).
While Kingfisher officials have always stressed that following the merger, the Air Deccan brand has been done away with and they now have one airline with three types of services-Kingfisher First, Kingfisher Class and Kingfisher Red, passengers do not read it that way.
Kingfisher Red is interpreted as Air Deccan for three reasons: its flights are operated from domestic terminal 1B, the same counters that were earlier used by Deccan.
Second, the aircraft generally have "Simplifly Deccan" written on them and, like the former Deccan, the aircraft do not have inflight entertainment and reclining seats. Finally, like Deccan, free food was not served on board, till recently.
The aircraft did not have inflight entertainment screens as well. "But what bothered us was that the seats were non-reclining. I don't care if I don't get inflight entertainment or free food, but I do not want my 70-year-old mother to sit upright for three-and-a-half hours as I had booked a KF Class flight and not a KF Red or Deccan flight. I paid about Rs 9,000 for two tickets and ensured that it was a full-service airline,'' said Dr Shimonta Sharma, who was travelling with his mother.
Other passengers, too, had similar protests.
"For the record, I would like to clarify that both the guests whom you spoke to were booked to travel on a flight operated by Kingfisher Red Service and the fare that they paid was also a fare for a Kingfisher Red service. I traced the booking details and from the PNR, we located the entire details," the Kingfisher spokesperson said.
When TOI conveyed the spokesperson's comments to the passengers after they landed, they were livid. "When I booked the ticket, I was told it was Kingfisher Class. I have a boarding pass that says Kingfisher Class and not Kingfisher Red. I also checked in from terminal 1A, which is used by Kingfisher Class,'' said Dr Sharma.
02/02/09 Manju V/Times of India

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Categories: kingfisher Feb 2009, Kingfisher Red Feb 2009