Air India’s website poses a major hurdle

Bookings interrupted by crashes, unresponsive buttons

08/05/2020, JAGRITI CHANDRA,NEW DELHI

Many Indians and foreign citizens planning to fly out in one of the special flights arranged by the government are fighting against all odds to book a ticket, which include an inefficient and snag-prone Air India website. Many have stormed the airline’s timeline on Twitter to complain about incomplete transactions, unresponsive buttons, website crashes and “misleading information” on visa norms.

“The website is unstable. It crashed last evening when I was booking a ticket to Newark. In this chaos, most of the seats were already booked,” said Shyamal Subramanyam, a U.S.-based scientist planning to travel from Pune.

“The website has contradictory information and travel advisories. I know their advisory for U.S. travellers, which says only U.S. citizens and holders of permanent residency will be allowed, is not a requirement laid down by the U.S. government. It also contradicts the Home Ministry order which allows Indians with a visa valid for a year,” said another traveller planning to go to Newark.

When these questions were posed to an Air India official, he replied, “The website is a non-issue. We are dealing with a mammoth logistical issue. In any website, the coding is such that a sudden spurt in traffic will lead to problems in the beginning but this stabilises over a period of time.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst & CEO, Greyhound Research, said, “Typically, airlines do demand mapping over a few [financial] quarters and a few months and then do the server sizing and the website works fine. But during an unplanned traffic surge, there are problems. This happens often but it doesn’t justify that their website was crashing. All it requires is to move the surge to a public cloud.”

What is missing is an efficient interface, especially at a time thousands of passengers are under distress. “A website which is frequently inaccessible, difficult to navigate, or poorly designed, inevitably detracts from the airlines image,” IndiGo’s Chief Commercial Officer Willy Boulter said.