Many Indians and foreign citizens planning to fly out in one of the special flights arranged by the government are fighting against all odds to book a ticket, which include an inefficient and snag-prone Air India website. Many have stormed the airline’s timeline on Twitter to complain about incomplete transactions, unresponsive buttons, website crashes, “misleading information” on visa norms, as well as lack of essential information for passengers.
“The website is unstable. It crashed last evening when I was booking a ticket to Newark. In this chaos, most of the seats were already booked by the people who took a chance earlier. Many people have been complaining about this issue,” said Shyamal Subramanyam, a U.S.-based scientist planning to travel from Pune.
“The website has contradictory information and travel advisories. I know their advisory for U.S. travellers, which says only U.S. citizens and holders of Permanent Residency will be allowed, is not a requirement laid down by the U.S. government. It also contradicts the Home Ministry order which allows Indians with a visa valid for a year,” said another traveller.
‘Logistical issue’
When these questions were posed to an Air India official he replied, “The website is a non-issue. We are dealing with a mammoth logistical issue. In any website, the coding is such that a sudden spurt in traffic will lead to problems in the beginning but this stabilises over a period of time.”
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What is missing is an efficient interface, especially at a time thousands of passengers under distress are trying to find a passage to a country where they work and call home. “A website which is frequently inaccessible, difficult to navigate or poorly designed inevitably detracts from the airline’s image,” IndiGo’s Chief Commercial Officer, Willy Boulter, told The Hindu .
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“Typically, airlines do demand mapping over a few [financial] quarters and a few months and then do the server sizing and the website works fine. But during an unplanned traffic surge, there are problems. This happens often but it doesn’t justify that their website was crashing. All it requires is to move the surge to a public cloud,” according to Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst & CEO, Greyhound Research.
Embassies are handling bookings for passengers trying to fly into the country.
