Subiman Kundu

A mathematics teacher of IIT Delhi has demanded compensation from low-cost airline IndiGo for allegedly getting its booking arithmetic wrong for a flight he wasn’t allowed to board despite holding a ticket.

Subiman Kundu, 51, reached Calcutta airport on Sunday evening to board Flight 6E 274 to Delhi, only to be told that the ticket he had purchased nearly two months in advance had been “transferred” to a flight the next morning.

When the IndiGo executive at the counter refused to issue a boarding pass, Kundu approached an official of the airline for assistance. “The official came to me a few minutes later and said he had tried to arrange for a special boarding pass but the aircraft was full,” Kundu told Metro.

He wrote an email to IndiGo on Monday, demanding Rs 5 lakh for breach of contract and harassment. Kundu alleged he was “abused and threatened” by the IndiGo staff when he demanded that he be put on another flight.

The IIT Delhi professor, who had arrived in Calcutta on October 3 with his wife and daughter to spend the Puja holidays, finally returned to Delhi on Monday evening by a Jet Airways flight.

The CEO of IndiGo, Bruce Ashby, denied that Flight 6E 274 had been overbooked. “It is not IndiGo’s policy or practice to overbook flights; in fact, we have never overbooked a flight. This situation was the result of a change in schedule. IndiGo deeply regrets the inconvenience caused, which was unintentional,” he said.

Ashby insisted that Kundu’s ticket was “transferred” to the next available flight, on Monday morning, only because a call to the cellphone number he had provided at the time of booking went unanswered. “Those who confirmed over phone that they did not have a problem with the new timing remained in the list of confirmed passengers. The rest were automatically transferred to the next available flight,” an official said.

Kundu, who received an email from the airline on October 9 about the flight being rescheduled from 7.45 to 7.05pm, was at the airport by 6pm on Sunday, unaware that his seat had by then been sold to someone else.

“We are currently investigating as to whether this was because IndiGo was provided invalid contact information, or whether our staff committed a clerical error of some sort,” Ashby said.