We bought return air tickets to india from ticketstoindia.co.uk who were acting as an agent in the UK for Kingfisher Airlines. Unfortunately whilst we were in India(March 2012) Kingfisher had financial problems and cancelled many flights (including all international flights ) . We rang and emailed ticketstoindia.co.uk asking for information and support to enable us to reshedule or rearrange our flights back home. This was when our problems started. This company were completely unhelpful. They would not provide any information about what was going on or provide any support in cancelling our tickets and rearranging our flights with another carrier. We were left to make our own arrangements. We still havnt received a refund from them, and I suspect we never will.
If you are buying air tickets to India use a reputable travel agent with some form of accreditation. Ticketstoindia.co.ok are a "bucket shop" who are only interested in taking your money. You can measure how good an organisation is by seeing how well they react when things go wrong. This company utterly fails that test .
Dear Tireless Traveller,
Apologies that you feel we did not support you during the difficult period when Kingfisher cancelled their flights. This was a very difficult period and like you, we were not 100% sure what was happening with Kingfisher and what would happen in the future. We could only act upon the information and commercial policy that we were receiving from the airline and at the time it was "do not cancel passengers bookings, we will be operating". The difficulty for us was if we did cancel and re-book passengers prior to a flight officially being cancelled, Kingfisher were refusing to refund, also if they were able to offer a re-route or another Kingfisher service they would not refund in the case of a new ticket being purchased. It was a catch 22 situation. The Kingfisher saga was very unprecedented, they have not gone into administration and even today still operate domestic flights within India so normal scheduled airline failure insurance did not apply. Likewise as we the agent have not defaulted, ATOL & the CAA rules do not apply. For a long period we were waiting for IATA to come to a reasonable conclusion with Kingfisher as to next steps and in particular what would happen with refunds. Luckily Kingfisher had a very large bond with IATA and IATA have agreed with Kingfisher that passengers will be refunded from this bond.
We have submitted over 500 refunds via IATA and we are currently waiting for IATA / Kingfisher to approve these and advise how much will be refunded. I can not discuss an individual case in a forum like this but please do contact me on john@ticketstoindia.co.uk and I will look into your case off line. If we are able to secure you a refund you have our assurances that we will do so and refund you for the portion of your ticket that was unused.
As to being a reputable agent with accreditation, I can assure you that we hold all the appropriate licences in the UK via the Civil Aviation Authority to operate as a retail travel agent, we are also members of the Advantage Travel Group. We take our business, reputation and responsibilities very seriously. If we did not we wouldn't have been in business for 15 years now arranging travel for over 80,000 passengers per year.
Kind regards John
Apologies that you feel we did not support you during the difficult period when Kingfisher cancelled their flights. This was a very difficult period and like you, we were not 100% sure what was happening with Kingfisher and what would happen in the future. We could only act upon the information and commercial policy that we were receiving from the airline and at the time it was "do not cancel passengers bookings, we will be operating". The difficulty for us was if we did cancel and re-book passengers prior to a flight officially being cancelled, Kingfisher were refusing to refund, also if they were able to offer a re-route or another Kingfisher service they would not refund in the case of a new ticket being purchased. It was a catch 22 situation. The Kingfisher saga was very unprecedented, they have not gone into administration and even today still operate domestic flights within India so normal scheduled airline failure insurance did not apply. Likewise as we the agent have not defaulted, ATOL & the CAA rules do not apply. For a long period we were waiting for IATA to come to a reasonable conclusion with Kingfisher as to next steps and in particular what would happen with refunds. Luckily Kingfisher had a very large bond with IATA and IATA have agreed with Kingfisher that passengers will be refunded from this bond.
We have submitted over 500 refunds via IATA and we are currently waiting for IATA / Kingfisher to approve these and advise how much will be refunded. I can not discuss an individual case in a forum like this but please do contact me on john@ticketstoindia.co.uk and I will look into your case off line. If we are able to secure you a refund you have our assurances that we will do so and refund you for the portion of your ticket that was unused.
As to being a reputable agent with accreditation, I can assure you that we hold all the appropriate licences in the UK via the Civil Aviation Authority to operate as a retail travel agent, we are also members of the Advantage Travel Group. We take our business, reputation and responsibilities very seriously. If we did not we wouldn't have been in business for 15 years now arranging travel for over 80,000 passengers per year.
Kind regards John
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