Book a Flight, not a Fight!

After a long gap of three years, John, and Leny along with their two children were looking forward to their trip back home to Kerala from London. John took the initiative to find a good deal with a travel agent to book tickets with one of the best-known airline brands in the world. He booked a flight from London to Kochi via Doha.

John was quite confident that it was going to be a fantastic journey, especially since they were travelling home after a long time. Everything was picture perfect till they landed in Doha. It was a lovely flight with all the comfort of a full carrier, and the experience was truly matching the airline brand.

Soon, they reached the transfer desk and were promptly directed to their connection flight. As soon as they arrived at the boarding gate, the world around them froze! To their surprise, they were getting into a narrow body aircraft, which was low-cost by design and obviously could not even compare to the facilities offered by a full carrier such as the one they arrived from London.

John was shocked! All what he did was to look at Leny once. She was fuming! The dead stare that he received from his sweetheart was akin to fire from a blast furnace. He was truly at a loss of words about what happened.

The ticket clearly showed the flight number for their entire journey, with two-letter code of the full carrier they took from London. No other flight number was seen on the ticket to depict that they will be transferred to a low-cost carrier. To make things worse, in the middle of scorching summer heat at Doha, their flight had to wait for a while to receive clearance to take-off. John had only one doubt. What was more on fire? The desert, or his darling? He continued to bear the brunt of anger from Leny throughout the flight, making the journey to Kochi one of his worst trips in his lifetime.

What really happened was, when John approached the travel agent for booking the ticket, he was provided with tickets for his entire journey. But those were tickets sold by the full carrier with a code share agreement with the low-cost carrier. In that case, the flight number remained the same. But on the ticket issued by the full carrier, for Kochi sector, there was a clear print below the flight number that said ‘operated by xyz airline’ which was the low-cost carrier. Unfortunately, poor John, did not know this difference and ended up being at the receiving end.

A codeshare flight is a commercial arrangement where an airline sells tickets for a flight, but the actual physical flight is provided by a partner airline. (Source: navan.com)

While booking a flight, just like any other service we avail, we need to have clarity on what we are paying for. Ask if you may so that you do not end up booking a fight instead of a flight.

Bon voyage.