There seems to be a bug in Air India’s reservation or pre-departure management systems that is making people miss their flights. If you are booked with the airline, it might interest you so that you can be careful.

Air India randomly emails customers about changes and cancellations to their flights.

I first heard of this issue yesterday when someone tagged me in a post on X. Air India notified the said passenger that his flight was cancelled, forcing him to call Air India’s call centre and get accommodated on another flight.  Unfortunately, in his case, this was someone travelling to attend the last rites of someone in their family, and they did not appreciate Air India’s unprofessionalism in this case.

I figured this was a random incident, but I looked up FlightRadar24, and the flight operated as scheduled. I’ve contacted the person who posted this information to check if the flight was initially scheduled to operate with an A350-900 and was swapped with an A320 at the last minute. It seems so because of a couple of reasons.

Through June 30, 2024, the said flight was operated by an A320neo at 9:40 AM. As of July 1, the flight was retimed to operate at 9:55/10:05 AM. The flight operates with an A350-900 every day except on Fridays (when perhaps the aircraft is pulled into maintenance). So, this was most probably a last-minute swap, and Air India did not communicate it honestly with the customer. Although, I’d wait to see a copy of the ticket to be sure.

Today, on July 4, 2024, they pulled a similar notification stunt on someone else. Someone was booked to fly from Mumbai to Bengaluru on AI639, and he got a message in the early morning that the flight was rescheduled and would depart 2:20 hours later. He later heard from Air India again that they had reinstated the flight to its original time.

Yet again, it caused the Air India customer to miss his flight. The customer summarised it in this longish post on X.

So everyone, here's the update for the Air India horror story that happened to me 48 hours after an Air India horror story occurred to me.

As you know, Air India sent me an official looking message that my 9 AM flight was rescheduled to 11:45 AM. So I altered my airport…

— The Kaipullai (@thekaipullai) July 4, 2024

Now, it is another case of Air India’s reservation systems acting up and sending out an alert that was not needed. The explanation given to the customer is also hilarious.

It’s amazing that there was no cross-check at the network OCC before this information was even input into the system.

Bottomline

Air India has a glitching system, one of hundreds of IT systems that make an airline. While it figures out where the glitch is and rectifies it, you’d do well to cross-check any alerts about your flight changes or cancellations before taking them as a given.

What do you make of the current IT issues at Air India?

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