NEW DELHI: Nitin Singla and his wife reached Doha airport on Monday night almost four hours before their Qatar Airways QA flight QR 570 to Delhi was to depart. But the couple and four other passengers – all holding confirmed tickets for this flight – were denied boarding. “…A QA executive told us… the flight was overbooked. According to the executive, all flights typically book 10% extra to hedge against the possibility of some passengers not showing up. Unfortunately for us everyone turned up for our flight,” Singla said in a Facebook post. They finally took a Tuesday evening QA flight to Delhi.
The airline says there is a massive shortfall in capacity on India-Qatar route that has been compounded after Jet Airways, which had 28 weekly flights on this sector, shut down. While there may be a demand-supply mismatch, that does not justify such overbooking of existing flights that it leads to denied barding of passengers holding confirmed tickets.
