"Offloading of a passenger with a confirmed status ticket due to overbooking is a highly unfair trade practice and not a part of the contract and amounts to misrepresentation as to the right of a passenger," the Commission's President Justice J D Kapoor held in a decision on Monday.

Ruling that a passenger having a confirmed ticket cannot be prevented from boarding a flight, the Commission noted that the practice of overbooking was ‘playing havoc’ with consumers who reach airports on time but are suddenly offloaded due to non-availability of seats.

Denying a seat to a consumer on this pretext leads to immense mental agony and trauma, it said, adding the airlines were required to compensate them adequately for such an act.

The Commission dismissed the air carrier's plea that as a number of passengers do not turn up for the flight, a practice of overbooking of passengers is adopted all over the world for maximum utilisation of seats and held that this could not be allowed by sacrificing or abridging a consumer's right.

In the present case, D G Sangal, a resident of Faridabad, had booked his journey for January 14, 2003 for Dubai but when he reached the airport, he was denied a seat by the airlines on the ground that the boarding passes had already exhausted.