Dear All,

I booked a ticket on Akbar Travels Online Ltd. (ATOL) for my friend Nityanand Mudaliyar to travel from Mumbai to Chennai on 3rd October 2009 on receiving the sad news of expiry of his grandmother. ATOL allowed me to book a ticket at around 3.30am IST with the help of netbanking. I paid the amount through my HDFC Bank A/c. to ATOL's account and it allowed me to complete the transaction providing me a AO Ref. No. and ticket of Kingfisher airlines at 6.10am on 3rd OCtober 2009. After few minutes, my friend received a call from ATOL's Customer support division's executive named Suraj that this ticket won't be valid since the flight time is less than 24 hours and none of the type of payment can be used to book the tickets through their portal since they could not be verified. On asking why did the system allowed, he could nto provide a valid answer and inturn asked to contact the Credit Card Verification Dept. at 10am in the morning.

I can understand that for Credit Card, they may take some time for verification but for Netbanking what is the problem they have? Infact the portal didn't allowed to make a payment through Credit Card but it asked to do a payment through Netbanking which was fair enough.

Although the money was transferred and the system allowed to book the ticket, the ATOL acted dumb by making my friend helpless and he has to again rush to the airport to buy a new ticket of the same flight.

Can they be taught a lesson in anyway??