India's airlines are cancelling tickets across the country citing government restrictions - and that's not the worst part

• Several users who had booked tickets after the relaxations of unlock 1.0, took to Twitter to complain about the cancellation of flights.
• People with tickets from Mumbai, Chennai took to Twitter and Spicejet replied to all with the same message.
• Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had on Friday said that there would be no further lockdowns in the state due to coronavirus.

Spicejet is cancelling tickets from several cities citing government imposed restrictions. Several users who had booked tickets after the relaxations of unlock 1.0, took to Twitter to complain about the cancellation of flights.

Business Insider reached out to Komal Nathani, whose tickets were cancelled from Mumbai to Kanpur. Nathani was confused as the government of Maharashtra had announced no such measures.

Several other users with tickets from Mumbai, Chennai took to Twitter and Spicejet replied to all with the same message.


"The Ministry of Civil Aviation had initially allowed each airline to operate 33% flights as per the approved summer schedule when it announced a resumption of operations in May. SpiceJet, like other airlines, started the sale of tickets as per the government orders. However, at the last minute due to reservations expressed by multiple state governments the flight schedule had to be further truncated resulting in many flights being cancelled," said a statement from Spicejet.

IndiGo too faced a similar brunt from consumers across the country. IndiGo CEO Ronojoy Dutta in an interview to PTI said that the government should allow flights to operate at 50% of pre-covid times right now, while being hopeful of running 70% of flights by December. Dutta also believes that the government should resume international flights by July.

Earlier, online travel agencies (OTA) had stopped selling GoAir tickets after numerous complaints of flight cancellations, refund and no response from the customer care team of the airline, according to reports.

According to reports, the customers said they were never informed about the cancelled flights until they tried to complete their web check-ins.

“We decided to stop selling GoAir tickets from Monday because of customer flak due to a high number of cancellations, the airline being slow on refunds and not responding to complaints. One is not receiving the right kind of support that one needs as an OTA to service our customers. We are taking a cautious approach. There have been a very large number of cancellations in the past two to three days,” a spokesperson of a leading OTA told The Hindu on the condition of anonymity as the airline is one of its key clients.

But the unavailability of flights yet the availability of booking tickets worries consumers who have to wait till the end to know that their flight was cancelled.


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