Yesterday I traveled on Jet from Delhi to Pune with my colleague. We arrived well in time at Delhi airport and got our boarding pass.We got adjasent seats allotted to us. Both of us had no check in baggage and carried our one piece luggage to the cabin.
We occuppied the seats. Afte 5 minutes, a passenger came to us and showed his boarding pass having same seat no. as my colleagu’s. The attendant took the baording pass and returned a few minutes later to inform that my colleague was upgraded to business class. He did not want to go through the exercise of shifting with luggage, so he allowed the other passenger to occupy the business class seat. Next was my turn. The same events repeated.
At this point the 3rd passenger in the row said aloud " now, I wait for my turn ". Luckily for him, no one came. It was luck that there were seats available in business class, so the staff could upgrade the tickets. WHAT IF ALL THE SEATS WERE FULL ? I shudder to think of such a possibility. My colleague had important businees meeting in Pune and I can’t imagine the chaos it would have created had he not been able to make it. I wonder how they could issue multiple boarding passes ( all electornic outputs - no manual writings).
The reliability of the process of issuing tickets is now being viewed with some suspicion. Also, if there are no proper chacks and controls, the coud be utter mayhem if multiple tickets are confirmed which exceed seating capacity of the flight. I hope this is an isolated incident, which no one would have faced.