BookMyShow aids return of 700 Indians, Indonesians amid pandemic-related travel restrictions

"We started these repatriation flights as a service to our community to help Indians and Indonesians return home," Chandrasekaran Rajalingam, president of Indonesia Tamil Sangam, said. He added that it was only possible with the strong support from the Indian Embassy in Jakarta, and from partners like BMS who helped digitise an extremely unwieldy manual process.

Online ticket booking platform BookMyShow (BMS) on Tuesday said it has assisted over 700 Indians and Indonesians, stranded in the two countries due to COVID-19-related travel restrictions, to return home. Many companies, including Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, had brought back many of their employees and their families from locations like the US amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns.

Currently, BookMyShow is working with the Indonesia Tamil Sangam to enable the next flight for passenger travel on October 15 and with Kerala Samajam Indonesia for a flight on November 10. With complexities surrounding international travel through the early part of the pandemic-induced lockdown restricting citizens' travel needs, BMS stepped in to support the Indian diaspora in Indonesia, according to a statement.

"Repatriation flights organised by local Indian communities and BMS in Jakarta, with the support of the Indian embassy in the capital city of Indonesia and the Indonesian Embassy in India, facilitated travel for Indians and Indonesians to reach their loved ones through special chartered flights under the Repatriation Flight Scheme," it added. BMS assisted over 700 Indians and Indonesians to travel on multiple routes between the two countries across three flights in July and August, it said.

BookMyShow looked after registration, collection and verification of requisite data and documentation for travel clearance and customer support and know-how of COVID-19 guidelines at each step, putting its experience in handling numerous complexities at large scale events into managing these flights. "We are living in some extraordinary times...we decided to help citizens in whatever way we could by taking our learnings, processes and systems from live events and applying it to help people in emergencies travel safely back home," BMS South East Asia CEO Kenneth Tan said.

He added that among the several citizens that were able to return home through this initiative, BMS was able to help 13 Indonesian marine crew fly back to Indonesia and 18 Indians working in West Java go back to India. "We started these repatriation flights as a service to our community to help Indians and Indonesians return home," Chandrasekaran Rajalingam, president of Indonesia Tamil Sangam, said.

He added that it was only possible with the strong support from the Indian Embassy in Jakarta, and from partners like BMS who helped digitise an extremely unwieldy manual process. Rajalingam also said BMS also helped feed critical and necessary reports to multiple government authorities such as the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Health, among others.