Since the shutdown of Jet Airways about 20 days ago, a lot of questions have been asked concerning how to people go on about their tickets. One thing is for sure, if and when the airline comes back to operations, they won’t be activating all their routes in one go. Many reasons for this. They have lost almost half their aircraft fleet to start. Owing to the shutdown, a lot of people are left with cancelled tickets, and they have had to buy new tickets to continue their travel plans for the moment. However, many people have their money stuck with the airline on account of pending refunds. Here is the latest Jet Airways Refund news.

Hereby, I share some thoughts about how it should work, and you can’t do much except twiddle your thumbs after taking care of these steps for the moment. There is a lawsuit that has been admitted in the Delhi High Court, asking for timely refunds to customers or other provisions, but that seems to be going nowhere.

What to do if you have booked a Jet Airways ticket with a Travel Agent?

As per travel agents, any refunds that were due till April 17, 2019, were already processed by Jet Airways via IATA. However, the next day, IATA unplugged Jet Airways from their billing platform, which meant there was no way that Jet Airways was going to be able to refund tickets to those who they owe money. Do they have the money? I don’t have a final number, but from various people, I’ve heard that anything between INR 350 Crores to INR 1,000 crores is with IATA as a security deposit. That means, this can be defrayed against refunding tickets for customers. Anything more and then Jet Airways needs to find the cash to make good the amounts.

Jet Airways has made a backend platform which is accessible only to travel agents. Those who have tickets booked via a travel agent, need to reach out to their travel agents, including their online travel agents to claim their refunds. This is the email that has been sent out by Jet Airways to the travel agents.

Like you can see, the process is simple. If you paid for your ticket in cash to Jet Airways (Debit Cards, NEFT count too), the agent would send the refund for validation to Jet Airways. Jet Airways will validate, and then IATA will authorise the refund of the amount to the Travel Agent, who can later pay it back to the customers. The filing of these refunds by your agent on behalf of yourself needs to be done by May 20, 2019. Subsequently, these will be validated and paid out, but it could take another 45 days from there.

If you paid with a credit card, that money perhaps never made it to Jet Airways in the first place and was held back by the card companies in an escrow account. Again, these agents will send the forms to Jet Airways, who will validate these and submit to the card companies for processing a reversal of your amounts.

What to do if you have booked a Jet Airways ticket directly?

You should ideally call the airline, or if you can, visit the airline’s ticketing office, usually at the airport. Jet Airways has opened up a separate website to process your refunds. Check here.

This is not some quick process again. At this moment, thousands of people are waiting on their money, and even if Jet Airways confirms to you that your ticket refund has been processed, it will take time to hit your card or your bank account. Social Media is full of instances where customers are asking about returns, the airline has told them they had approved the refund, but they don’t know what to do further.

Another way to go if you have booked with your credit card is perhaps to dispute the transaction and raise a chargeback request. In this case, since the service was not provided to you, it should be reversed for the time being while the credit card company fights it out with the airline.

What has been your experience receiving refunds from Jet Airways? Quick for you, or has it been a long drawn process?