News Desk :
You can buy tickets online for trains, buses and some water vessels, but not for flights of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, the national flag carrier.
It has not been selling tickets online for five months now, with the blame falling on the local tech firm supervising the online sale for stopping the services “irrationally and unethically after failing to fulfil Biman’s demands”. The company, Travel Shop Limited, says Amazon Web Services shut its server because Biman did not pay bills despite repeated reminders.
Biman tickets, however, are still available on third-party websites and apps, aside from the airline’s own sales centres and authorised agents.
The cost of tickets on the routes to the Middle East has increased recently, with expatriate workers being forced to pay more than double the price to book flights through airline agents.
The online ticket booking platforms of other state airlines don’t shut down for even a second, said Iqbal Mahmood Bablu, president of Bangladesh Outbound Tour Operators Association.
“And the travellers have been buying tickets of our state carrier from third parties for five months. It is causing losses to the passengers while Biman itself is paying commission.”
Iqbal believes Biman officials’ negligence or irregularities for “personal benefit” led to the situation. “Otherwise it [Biman’s online ticket sale] shouldn’t have stopped for such a long time.”
“Our honourable prime minister [Sheikh Hasina] has bought so many fourth-generation aircraft for Biman. Train and bus tickets are available online. And, we often speak about digital Bangladesh. Then why should the ticketing apps of an agency like Biman be shut?”
A foreign technology firm supervised Biman’s website until 2019. Officials say the website could not draw customers due to problems with issuing refunds and booking the wrong flights, among others. Later, Travel Shop got the job of selling Biman tickets online.
Its COO ASM Muktadir said they first made Biman an app that was successfully launched by the prime minister in December 2019. Another firm, Zapways, was supervising Biman’s website at the time.
Biman later replaced Zapways with Travel Shop to run the website. A stipulation of the deal was that Travel Shop would not be paid for developing the website. But it would be entitled to a $1 commission for each ticket sold on international routes and $0.45 on domestic routes, according to Muktadir.
Biman was supposed to pay server bills in line with the deal, he said. The server bill was huge because of the large transaction data involved. Ticketing error dropped below 2 percent after Travel Shop took charge of the website, according to the company’s COO.
“We still paid compensation for any error. Then, flight operations were closed during the pandemic. Even after that, tickets worth Tk 1.25 billion were sold through the website until August 2021. But Biman did not pay the server bills and Amazon repeatedly gave us warnings.
“We reminded Biman of the matter and we could not pay the bills ourselves due to the losses incurred amid the pandemic. Finally, Amazon said it would stop the services if the bills were not cleared by Aug 10.
“When we informed Biman about the matter, it asked the banks to block the payment gateways instead of paying the bills. So, later it was not possible to run the website.”
Tahera Khandaker, a spokesperson for Biman, said the online ticketing service will resume soon as the work to launch a new website is ongoing. Asked why the services were shut, she referred to a statement issued by the carrier on Aug 11.
In the statement, Biman said it gave the job of supervising the website to a local firm in a bid to encourage Bangladeshi entrepreneurs.
But the firm “failed to fulfil expectations at different levels repeatedly”. Finally, on Aug 10, the company halted services “irrationally and unethically”, and tried to “mislead” the people.
