My Nephew and his mother travel first time back to Mumbai from Sydney this Sunday on the Malaysian, (MH) Route Syd-KUL-BOM. They were traveling first time on such a long-distance flight with a stop over. They have traveled overseas but those were direct and short flights.
The MH incoming flight landed one hour late and so departed another one hour late and landed late due to bad weather as a result they missed their connecting flight from the KUL-BOM sector. as transit time was about 90 minutes.
At Kula Lumpur, the MH rebook them on another flight to Madras which is in India on MH, and thereafter on a domestic Vistara flight to Mumbai.
The issue is that MH landed in Madras by Midnight and the next flight out of Madras was by late morning around 11 am the next day.
When they request another direct flight MH staff at Kula Lumpur told them that the next available flight to Mumbai will be after 48 hours and so this is the best offer than can do for a long stopover wait they mentioned kindly asking the staff in Madras for assistance.
When they landed in Madras there was no MH staff as Air India handled the flight on their behalf and Airindia has no instruction, so they direct them and other about 55 of them to the domestic airport for an onward flight around midnight.
Normally airports in India operate at midnight so they were allowed to enter the domestic terminal but there was no counter open. In India, once you enter the airport pricint then you cannot leave the airport gate unless you have approval from airline agencies and you need to stay there, due to security reasons, so you cannot leave the airport and decide to go and take a hotel nearby and claim the cost from insurance.
Here comes the catch, the new airline Vistara don't attend their request as they were not their passenger. No MH staff in Madras to attend and to ask for local accommodation option as stopover is for more than 11 hours. Airindia is their handling agent and has nothing to do with MH.
I really felt passengers were misguided, and cheated by various airline agencies and usher them.
Considering that many people will be traveling now and with high demand and quality of service has degraded can someone from the industry guide the forum what they should do next or steps they need to take to ensure that at least accommodation is organized for a long stop over and we can guide others who come across with this kind of situation.
I am not here to file any case against any airline but to understand, who is responsible and what rights we got as consumer so that we can ask these rights from the airline when such a situation arises.
Did they actually have travel insurance?