When Confirmed Plane Tickets Go Void

Earlier this year, my wife made a booking for a Virgin Atlantic flight from Bombay to London for herself and my daughter through an online travel agency (MakeMyTrip.com) in India. Soon afterwards, she received the necessary confirmations and, after a few days, found that the cost of the tickets was duly debited to her credit card account.

A couple of days before the departure date, she was able to view her confirmed booking on Virgin’s website.

So far so good.

However, when she reached the Bombay airport on the day of travel, she was shocked to hear from the Virgin Atlantic check-in agent that her tickets were VOID! When she immediately called me in London, I checked Virgin’s website and found that the booking (PNR = CG465S) was very much showing up as valid and was permitting me to go ahead and complete the check-in formalities!

This was ridiculous!

When I offered to fax this page to Virgin in Bombay as proof that the booking was still valid, they weren’t interested. They maintained that their system was showing a VOID status and there was no way they would let my family travel on that ticket – that’s that. According to Virgin, if my family wanted to travel, they’d have to buy new tickets. Faced with no other alternative and the flight due to depart in two hours, that’s what my wife did.

A few minutes later, I was able to view the new booking (PNR = F13L5M) on Virgin’s website.

This is perhaps the first time that the same passenger names were showing up on two different PNRs on the same flight – something which I never thought was possible.

Anyway, after my family reached London – on the planned date but after having paid twice! – we took this up with Virgin. They told us to pursue our refund request with the online travel agency from whom we had purchased the tickets. When we did that, the travel agency immediately promised to process our refund. They did this without offering any explanation for what happened – though readers of my previous post “Beware of Online Travel Agencies”  might have already guessed what must have transpired behind the scenes.

While the story had a happy ending, my belief in the system is so badly shaken as a result of these recent experiences that I wonder if I’ll ever book any tickets in the future through an online travel agency.