Hundreds of people from Pune, who were travelling to the international airport terminal in Mumbai, face financial losses due to cancelled flights. Express
When Vikas Shah, a resident of Bijapur in Karnataka, started out for his journey to Mumbai on the Nagercoil Express on Tuesday morning with his wife, the senior citizen couple had no idea of the ordeal that they would face ahead.
Forced to get off at Pune station at 5 pm due to the cancellation of the train towards Mumbai where torrential rains were lashing, the 65-year-old said that he was not ready to give up on his attempt to reach the airport in time for his early morning flight on Wednesday to Detroit, USA, where his daughter lives.
“I had relatives in Pune who I called and they booked me a cab service to Mumbai. We reached till the first toll naka and there all cars were halted. We were told that no one can go ahead. We tried calling the airlines for help, but yesterday no help was forthcoming. Finally, we had to return and right now I am staying with relatives in Pune while my daughter is frantically trying to book us alternate flights,” Shah said, adding that he had spent nearly Rs 2 lakh in booking the flight which he couldn’t take.
But Shah isn’t alone. Like him, hundreds of people from Pune, who were travelling to the international airport terminal in Mumbai, have lost big sums of money over cancelled flights, besides having been forced to cancel meetings scheduled abroad.
Jaykumar Prasad, a manager at Forbes Marshall, was scheduled to catch a 2.30 am flight to UK for which he left home at least nine hours early. Yet, even he had to return from the express highway. “We have an ongoing project there for which I had to travel for work. Now my company’s appointed travel agency is looking for alternate options, but so far I haven’t found anything suitable. While the loss will be borne by the company, I am hoping that international airlines considered that it was a natural calamity here and do not charge for cancellation or take nominal amount,” he said.
While most people have been unsuccessful at getting alternate flights so far, some of them who were desperate to fly for urgent meetings said they had to end up spending double the amount of money, besides enduring long waiting hours. Pimpri resident Anagha Tone, whose husband Mahavir had to fly to Rwanda (Africa) for a two-day workshop and meeting, recalled how she spent all of Tuesday scanning news channels for information on Pune-Mumbai travel. “My husband’s flight was at 4.30 am from Mumbai on Wednesday. He left by 6.15 pm on Tuesday and till then we had been watching news channels, but they didn’t say expressway was closed. When he reached till toll naka, they said it’s closed. But he didn’t want to give up so he took the old highway and reached till Lonavala, but from there, he was turned back. In the meantime, I was looking for alternate options, other airports he could fly from,” she said.
While her husband finally got onto a flight from Pune to Delhi and another flight to Rwanda via Turkey, she said they were expensive and the wait time at layover was very long.
Travel operators say that the number of customers who had to cancel on Tuesday and now want to reschedule travel runs into several hundreds. Kedar Kasar, owner of KK travels, which has one of the largest fleet of vehicles engaged in Pune-Mumbai travel, said that of 72 vehicles that left Pune for Mumbai airport on Tuesday, at least 60 came back. Each had a occupancy of minimum three people. “Not just drops, even pick-ups were affected. People who had booked pick-ups were stranded at airport. Today, I sent 30 empty cars from here for them. Now, all these cancelled people want to reschedule when they get flights and we are trying our best to accommodate them,” he said.
