One slip-up and SpikeJet takes your trip: Buying air tickets online can be an exercise closer to quantum mechanics

So, a man is trying to buy two air tickets from Delhi to one of the mountain airports up north for a date towards October-end. He goes online to, let's just call it TakeMyTrip, and scans prices. At first, he gets what seem like crazily high prices - about ₹11,500 a ticket on, let's just call it, SpikeJet, shall we?

After exploring other airlines, he comes back to the SpikeJet page, and it's now offering much lower prices - around ₹6,500 per seat. He puts in passenger details and the date of flight, adding flight protection in case the flight is delayed.

He has to enter the details three times because the website doesn't seem to catch his keystrokes. But when it is done at 10 pm, he pays ₹13,540 for 2 tickets. When the ticket arrives in his mailbox, he goes into shock: the booked flight is for the next morning, not 58 days later, which is when he wants to fly.


The man then spends two hours trying to salvage the situation. First, he goes to SpikeJet and tries to cancel the tickets. He sees he will get back only ₹2,464, losing about ₹11,000. Then he remembers he has purchased a free date change, so he tries that.

Hah, hah - the date change is free, but the additional price for flying on the desired day takes the cost up to the originally crazy-seeming ₹11,500 a ticket.

The man tries calling the airline. For his trouble, he gets 15 minutes of: 'Our agents are currently dealing with other customers, please hold. Your call is important to us.' It's like a hypnotic cult chant, but thankfully there's no intervening muzak to fry his brain further.

He hangs up and calls the large insurance company that provides the date-change protection he purchased, and here he lucks out. Or seems to. A polite human tells him the travel department will help him and connects him. The man stays on the call for 22 min and 15 secs: 'Please hold. All our customer care executives are busy. We will speak to you shortly.'

The man goes back to SpikeJet and connects with the chatbot. He has decided he will pay the extra amount for the date change. The SpikeJet chatbot is friendly, prompt, and clear: 'Total extra payable ₹9,842. Would you like to confirm this change and pay the extra amount of ₹9,842?' The man confirms. The next message: 'Please pay ₹16,048 to confirm your booking.'

The man yelps at the chatbot: 'YOU JUST SAID ₹9,842!' The chatbot is unmoved: 'I have clarified with my executive. The final amount is ₹16,048.'

₹13,000 plus ₹16,000 makes it ₹29,000, a chunk more than the initial ₹11,500 x 2 = ₹23,000. Somewhere, the AI chatbot (or the exec behind it) has understood that this hapless moron of a customer is helpless, and that it's time to turn on the lemon squeezer. The man girds the bullet, bites his loins, and cancels the booking.

The message from TakeMyTrip says the refund will be ₹2,464. The amount that arrives is ₹1,166. The final damage being around ₹12,400 for a brief mistake on two glitchy, trap-filled websites.

What could be the solution? Here are 3 suggestions:

1. Before final payment is initiated and accepted, the exact flight, date and cost should be displayed in large, clear fonts.

2. There should be an option for no-cost, no-questions-asked cancellation within 2 hours of any air-ticket purchase.

3. All surge-pricing skulduggery should be banned. Even if the customer missed checking the flight date , there's no way the price for an end-October flight went up by ₹3,000 a ticket in the 2 hours between 10 pm and midnight in early September.

That was pure robbery, to add to the general, all-pervading digital sleight of hand. Some consumers would say there should also be an additional penalty for the hub website and airline for putting the customer through extra bheja-frying.