Consumer complaint against Air India
I need opinion on having a consumer complaint against Air India.
We had a flight scheduled at 7:20pm on 24/1. We tried webcheckin the previous day but it failed. We contacted customer care for the same and they informed us that they can’t web check in from there end, informed us everything is fine with the booking and we can get it done at the counter the next day.
We reached the air india kiosk somewhere around 6:10pm and tried to again self check in through the device. It didn’t allow us either, and stated stand-by in front of our names. There was an employee who asked to stand in queue for this.
We stood in the queue and I saw that the special assistance line was empty, as we didn’t have any baggage to drop I went back to the employee and asked if we can directly go to special assistance for the boarding pass. She told we can, I went there, the agent at the counter told us that counter is closed at 6:20 and nothing can be done now. It was 6:25 when we were having this discussion. They refused to adjust us into any upcoming flight citing that our flight was non refundable, and that nothing can be done.
Can I take this to consumer court ? We did try web check in earlier which didn’t workout, and even their agent didn’t help (I know indigo allows us to webcheck in through customer service, not sure about air india). We were on time but their staff never informed us to directly go to the counter or if there was any cutoff for check in. We asked them to check cctv in case they don’t trust our arrival to the airport but obviously they didn’t.
Our only fault maybe was that we should have reached 2 hours before but we didn’t have any reason to arrive that early. At every other step it was either the airline or the staff’ fault. I have proof of failed webcheckin screenshot as well. If we were able to do that we could have simply walked in.
Please suggest if anything can be done, we lost 16k for this booking and had to book alternate flight at almost 40k.