For the record.

I was supposed to fly KingFisher this morning. I arrived at the airport only to be told that I didn’t have a booking. This, despite me being issued a PNR.

My story: I booked the flight online on the airline’s website on Thursday using my credit card and got the PNR, which drew me to the obvious assumption that I had the flight booked. Due to lack of any communication from KingFisher, I held on to my assumption until it got squashed this morning on my arrival at the airport.

Their story: After issuing me the PNR, they found out that the credit card transaction didn’t go through. They called me on 19th and I didn’t answer the phone. They cancelled my flight.

Facts:

1. I was never made aware that my credit card transaction didn’t go through. The way any sane online credit card transaction works is this. They take my credit card details, verify that the payment can go through, record the transaction with the payment gateway and then issue the confirmation to me. Not KingFisher’s, it seems. They somehow decided that the way the rest of the world does things does not suit them.

2. They called me. Once. I was in a meeting and didn’t answer. I didn’t know the call was from KingFisher and didn’t call back. The customer service now tells me that they expect me to call back. Expect. I get loads of marketing calls everyday and usually don’t bother calling back unknown numbers.

3. They cancelled my booking and didn’t think it is important enough to inform me.

4. No email or SMS communication was made. None at all.

5. No one is even apologising for all the screw ups, they are acting as if they were doing me a great favour by letting me book the flight in the first place.

6. They are not able/willing to tell me what went wrong with the credit card transaction. I definitely have credit available on it — I just purchased a ticket on the very same card.

7. I am wasting an entire day and some money because KingFisher Airlines has such retarded processes.

PS: I am at the airport now, waiting for my flight in the afternoon. I am using the Airtel Mobile Office to go online from the airport. This rocks.

PS 2: Why is it that not one person making the announcements here in the airport is able to blurt out a single sentence without faltering?

I was at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day this weekend with my friend and colleague Sundar. For the most part, it was a lot of fun.

The hacking started at 5pm on Friday and went on till 5pm on Saturday. I had finished my hacks by late night and got really bored from then. Tired too. It seems I am becoming old quite fast! There were times when I could did go without without sleep for 60 hours straight and here I was tired in just half as much.

I did a couple hacks by myself:

Google Search Assist: An implementation of Yahoo! Search Assist for Google. Well, almost.

Del.icio.us Tag Management: A set of ruby scripts that allow you to deal with your tags in del.icio.us in a more automated fashion. The first script identifies duplicates like “movie” and “movies”, asks you which to keep and automatically renames all tags accordingly. The second script allows you to keep del.icio.us tag bundles updated.

and helped Sundar a bit with another hack:

Zooky: Find precise answers related to local, movies, restaurants, ringtones, ATMs, and a lot more info. You can also ask or tell your friends about your find! All from within Y! Messenger whether they’re online or not. We’ll probably be releasing an enhanced version of this in the future.

I won the Best “Really Needs an Interface” hack award for the del.icio.us tag. Christian Heilmann, a UI guru from Yahoo! UK gave me a book (that he co-wrote) as the prize. The book is, aptly, about web interfaces. Thanks, Chris!

Even better than the award was a comment I got about the same del.icio.us hack: “that’s the only hack among all the hacks here that I see myself using.” Thanks, Naseer!

Check out all the hacks that were presented, there sure were some very interesting ones: results of the Open Hack Day Bangalore 2007.