Air India website refuses to book business class seats

“There have been instances when our portal has showed that all tickets from J class have been booked but on enquiring at the airport we have found that seats were available on the same flight,” said a senior Air India official. “There was this flight to Frankfurt where the portal showed that all J class tickets were booked however on checking I realised that there was only 40% occupancy in that section,” he added. Sources also said that the problem was also acknowledged by Air India’s CMD Arvind Jadhav in one of the first turnaround committee meetings held about three months ago.

The entire Air India portal has been described sort of archaic compared to competing domestic and international carriers’ websites. “They had promised seamless connectivity from ‘Patna to Pennsylvania’ when the two airlines were merging in 2007 but the website is anything but an example of that,” said the Air India official.

Revamp of Air India’s website is a part of the Rs 1,200-crore IT revamp that was announced in June 2008 with total integration promised in the following 12-18 months.

Post the merger V Thulasidas,who was the first CMD to preside over the merged entity,had said that it was the software part that had plagued the national carrier in the last few decades. An Air India spokesperson acknowledged the problem. However further details were not given.