Indigo flight disruptions leave passengers stranded and baggage unclaimed at Delhi Airport

New Delhi: At Terminal 1 of Indira Gandhi International Airport, there are dozens of tagged but unclaimed suitcases. There are also travellers desperate to reunite with their luggage.Among them is a new bride who flew from Switzerland to Udaipur, married her Swiss fiance on Dec 5 and took the flight to Delhi from there on Dec 7. She was supposed to go to Raipur, but her IndiGo flight was cancelled, as were hundreds that day in Delhi and elsewhere. Oddly — or maybe not, given the scale of the fiasco — the luggage flew out, but not to Raipur. Three suitcases landed in Dehradun, the bride found out later. Two other suitcases are yet to be traced.Her challenge now is to get all her bags to Delhi before flying out of India.For passengers like her, the distress of losing almost all their travel possessions is perhaps heavier than the cumulative weight of the suitcases. "I requested them that I'll collect the bags here in Delhi, or even id they send them to Raipur," the bride said, exhausted after two days of luggage hunting. "So why on earth did they send them to Dehradun?" Monday night is the flight back to Switzerland. The bags that have been found are on their way to Delhi, she's been told. She's not sure if they will reach on time. Another passenger, in a similar state of despair, stood nearby. Vishal Jain was there to claim his and his wife's luggage. The couple's journey began in Dublin. They landed in Delhi on Dec 7 from Istanbul on a connecting flight from Dublin. Their onward flight to Indore via IndiGo was cancelled. Since then, the couple has been hunting for their two checked-in bags. "They are trying to help. I understand," Jain said wearily, "but all I want is our bags. I'll claim them here if need be or even if we end up taking another flight."The plight of the passengers started on Dec 3. The airline has described its current challenge as a mix of minor technical glitches, winter-schedule adjustments, adverse weather, congestion in the aviation system and an update in its crew rostering system. The flight situation worsened quickly, disrupting thousands of passengers — some forced to book expensive last-minute tickets to attend to emergencies. Since Dec 3, at least 475 departures and 371 arrivals were cancelled in Delhi alone, affecting both domestic and international operations. Airports are filled with stranded travellers and unclaimed baggage. There is also mounting rage targeted at the country's largest domestic airline. The ministry of civil aviation stepped in and ordered IndiGo to trace and deliver all the unclaimed or lost baggage within 48 hours.In a statement on Monday, IndiGo said it has delivered around 4,500 of an estimated 9,000 misplaced bags and it aims to return the rest within 36 hours. It also claimed improvements in operations, network restoration. It claimed it had refunded Rs 825 crore and would expeditie the rest of the refunds up to Dec 15. Despite all this, IGI recorded cancellations of at least 83 departures and 60 arrivals on Monday, indicating that the strain across the system remained.