Airline asks stranded fliers for cash

LONDON – Airlines have already begun charging for food, drinks, seat assignments and baggage. Now one is demanding that passengers cough up extra cash on board for fuel.

Hundreds of passengers traveling from India to Britain were stranded for six hours in Vienna when their Comtel Air flight stopped for fuel on Tuesday. The charter service asked them to kick in more than $30,000 to fund the rest of the flight to Birmingham, England.

The situation may represent a new low in customer care in an era when fliers are seeing long lines, long waits and few perks.

Britain’s Channel 4 news broadcast video showing a Comtel cabin crew member telling passengers: “We need some money to pay the fuel, to pay the airport, to pay everything we need. If you want to go to Birmingham, you have to pay.”

Some passengers said they were sent off the plane to cash machines in Vienna to raise the money.

“We all got together, took our money out of purses – 130 pounds ($205),” said Reena Rindi, who was aboard with her daughter. “Children under two went free, my little one went free because she’s under two. If we didn’t have the money, they were making us go one by one outside, in Vienna, to get the cash out.”

The situation was highly unusual in Europe, where airlines are tightly regulated, said Sue Ockwell, a crisis management expert at Travel PR.

The passengers did eventually reach Birmingham, but many expressed anger.

“It is absolutely disgusting,” said Dalvinder Batra, who is from the West Midlands. “There are still people stuck out there.”

Bhupinder Kandra, the airline’s majority shareholder, told the Associated Press from Vienna that travel agents had taken the passengers’ money before the planes left but had not passed it on to the airline.

“This is not my problem,” he said. “The problem is with the agents.”

But Kandra insisted Thursday the company was still solvent.

“We have not run out of money,” he said. “We have enough.”

Ockwell dismissed Kandra’s explanations, saying it sounded like a bad credit issue.

“One really does wonder,” she said.

Airport officials in Birmingham said Thursday that Comtel’s flights this weekend had been canceled, but Kandra insisted all would be operating as normal.