The airline initiated an internal probe after Venugopal, who was on board a Delhi-Kochi-Thiruvananthapuram flight on January 4, saw 23 vacant seats inside while a Kerala minister was denied a seat on grounds of "non-availability".
The junior minister promptly asked Air India to probe the matter.
Following the directive, the airline launched the inquiry and suspended two officials of the customer service department pending its completion.
The probe found that two groups of passengers were supposed to travel by that flight as per the 'summary sheet'. However, one of these groups had not been ticketed though PNR (Passenger Name Record) numbers were issued to them, airline officials said.
The customer service staff only saw the 'summary sheet' but did not pull out the PNRs to check whether tickets had been issued to this group, they said, adding that this led the flight to operate with 23 vacant seats.
Had these staffers checked whether tickets had been issued on the basis of these PNRs, the vacancies would not have existed as this capacity would have been released for bookings and to accommodate waitlisted passengers, the officials said, terming it as "negligence" on part of the staffers concerned. (More)
