- Representational Image. - Photo: Biman website
DHAKA: The civil aviation ministry has found several Biman officials, including high-ups, fully responsible for the syndicate that artificially hiked the prices of flight tickets to Malaysia in May this year.
It also found that tickets were being blocked in the names of its former minister Lt Col Muhammad Faruk Khan and the airlines' former managing director Shafiul Azim.
The officials found to be running the syndicate also implicated Mohammad Salauddin, marketing director of Biman (currently on post-retirement leave) in their statements to the ministry-led committee.
The committee also found his involvement "beyond doubt".
It issued a report, which was signed by the ministry's Additional Secretary Fatema Rahim Veena, Joint Secretary Anup Kumar Talukdar and Deputy Secretary Ahmed Jamil on July 7.
"The last date for sending workers to Malaysia was May 31, 2024. Ticket prices for Biman flights shot up abnormally during that time," said the report.
"Between April 15, 2024, and May 31, 2024, the ticket price of an economy class seat on a Biman flight between Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur rose from Tk 20,475 to Tk 73,710 [excluding taxes]."
Biman had operated seven regular and eight special flights during that period.
The price hike led to planes flying with empty seats even as migrant workers, who were trying to get to Malaysia, despaired at the airport.
Several thousand failed to make it to the southeast Asian country in time before the gate closed, as their recruiting agencies could not manage their tickets.
"During that period, Biman's website showed that all tickets were sold out.
"However, at that time Biman's sales counters were not selling any tickets for any of the flights other than the special flight scheduled for May 31, 2024," said the report.
Travel agents book tickets from a platform called the global distribution system (GDS) – a system that links reservation inventory under one computer-based network.
When a flight is opened for booking on the system, all travel agents registered with it get a notification alerting them so they can start booking tickets.
The ministry report, however, found that even before the notification was sent out, Biman officials blocked seats -- often all of them on a single plane -- to favour 14 specific travel agencies.
These agencies then sold those tickets at exorbitant prices, several times higher than Biman's official prices, and kept the difference for themselves.
The travel agencies are Gemini Travels Ltd; Safar Travels & Tourism; East West Travels & Tours Pvt Ltd; Kazi Aid International Pvt Ltd; Valencia Air Travels & Tours Ltd; Xpress Travel Holidays; Travel Zone; Seri Mechan Travel; Triplover Ltd; Sunshine Travel Air International; Flyover Tours & Travels; Sadia Travels; Globe Travel Service (Bangladesh), and Travelchamp Ltd.
A total of 480 travel agencies are registered with Biman.
All of the seats of BG9087 and BG382 flights, which flew from Dhaka to Kuala Lumpur on May 27, 29 and 30, were blocked out for these travel agencies.
"A total of 1,146 out of 2,150 seats from five of the seven flights conducted were blocked from Biman's central reservation department, and the PNRs [booking reference numbers] were distributed to certain travel agencies," said the report.
"As a result, the other travel agencies were deprived of equal access to those tickets. This also meant the selected travel agencies got the chance to artificially increase the ticket prices of those seats."
Only two tickets were sold from Biman's ticket counters until May 30, said the report.
During the investigation, the committee also came across a snapshot showing 91 tickets were booked with the reference of former minister Lt Col Muhammad Faruk Khan and Biman's former managing director Shafiul Azim.
The MD's official phone number was used for the booking.
The committee included the snapshot in the report.
A group booking reference for 90 seats for flight BG9086, slated to fly on May 27, 2024, was generated in their names by Golam Mostafa, a manager of Biman's Revenue Management System Department, at 5.28am on May 26, 2024.
However, no tickets were generated, found the investigators. Instead, one more seat booking was added, and then the seats were distributed to two travel agencies called Gemini Travels Ltd and Flyover Tours & Travels Ltd, who got 51 and 40 seats respectively.
Biman's Deputy Manager (commercial) Tabibur Rahman distributed the seats.
Former Biman MD Shafiul Azim expressed shock that his and the former minister's names and his phone number were used to block tickets in bulk.
"The minister had asked us to take steps to ensure that migrant workers trying to go to Malaysia could get tickets.
"I had instructed the marketing director in good faith to ensure that workers get tickets.
"I didn't realise the staffers would do this," said Azim, currently the Election Commission secretary.
Former civil aviation minister Lt Col Faruk Khan was contacted via phone and text message but was unreachable as of the filing of this report around 9.30pm.
The ministry-led committee also detailed how Biman officials logged in together at the dead of the night to manually block seats.
The flight information of BG382, which was scheduled to fly on May 30, was published at 12.04am on May 24.
By 12.15am, Mohammad Hasan Ahmed, an operation controller from Biman's Revenue Management System Department, had manually blocked 206 seats.
He was joined by Manager (commercial) Golam Mostafa and Assistant Manager (commercial) Farhana Akhter, and by 2.21am, 329 seats were blocked.
Between 7.04am and 7.08am, Md Tabibur Rahman blocked 63 more seats, the report stated.
Golam Mostafa claimed the rules and policies were followed to the dot and nothing abnormal happened.
The report added that if Biman had sold the tickets for the two May 30 flights from its own sales counters, instead of blocking them for the chosen travel agents, the airlines could have saved Tk 8.23 lakh just on this one flight.
The ministry also scrutinised two more such flights, including one where the booking reference was created using the MD's phone number, and found that the national flag carrier could have saved Tk 14.2 lakh on these flights if their officials did not block the seats.
The committee found that Biman officials also overbooked the entire flight up to one and a half times to favour the aforementioned travel agencies.
The overbooking of tickets is an internationally accepted practice.
This is done to avoid empty seats in case of passenger no-shows and last-minute cancellations.
The number of tickets to be overbooked depends on the historical trends of the number of seats that go empty on that particular flight.
However, as many as 100 seats on the BG382 flight on May 29, 2024, were overbooked, according to the report. A total of 373 tickets were booked manually by Biman officials against 271 seats.
In spite of this level of manual overbooking, the plane flew with eight empty seats even in peak season, implying that they did not find customers willing to pay the inflated prices of the tickets.
The same thing happened on May 30, 2024, when 392 seats were manually blocked by Biman against 298 seats, and the plane flew with several empty seats.
The ministry found that complaints were filed about Farhana and Tabibur multiple times and they were proven guilty of ticket syndicating in the past by Biman, but the airlines took no action against them.
Instead, Tabibur was even recruited contractually after his retirement.
Contacted, he denied the allegations.
Farhana said that in her rank, she does not even have the system access needed to overbook such flights. She expressed shock at the ministry's findings.
When relayed specific examples of how chunks of tickets were blocked by her ID, she said she has no idea how it happened because she does not have the necessary permissions to do so.
The ministry-led committee's report also found that the marketing and sales head Mohammed Salauddin did not intervene when his direct subordinates were blocking tickets and overbooking every single day.
"He supported the corruption of his team and it is mandatory to take disciplinary action against him," it said. - The Daily Star/ANN
