Bed bugs have infested at least two Air India flights out of Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, passengers claimed. Some said they have the bites to prove it.
The carrier is now facing heavy criticism following multiple complaints from disgruntled customers about seats that contained bed bugs in the last week, Fox News reported.
The situation was serious enough that the airline was forced to ground two planes to fumigate them after several passengers, including children and a baby, suffered bites, the Hindustan Times reported.
Powai resident Kashmira Tonsekar was flying business class with her family Wednesday when her young daughter complained of rashes.
Upon further inspection, the shocked mother found bed bugs crawling around the seats.
“We alerted the crew who sprayed a repellent. After a while, more bugs started coming out from that and other seats,” she said.
The family were moved to economy class and Kashmira’s husband, Pravin Tonsekar, pursued the matter once they had landed.
"All our seats infested with bed bugs,” he said in a tweet.
When Air India apologized in a reply to his post, Tonsekar pointed out that “such a thing should not have happened in the first place,” adding that his wife and daughters “had to suffer half of the journey.”
New Jersey resident Vivek Modi, who was on the same flight, said he could see the bed bugs on the seats while Rohan, another passenger on the flight, complained that his wife and three children suffered from bed bug bites “all over their bodies.”
On Thursday, passengers on a separate Air India plane, who were also travelling from Newark to Mumbai, said they suffered from multiple bites during the flight. Among them was an eight-month-baby, Times of India reported.
According to NJ.com, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey denied receiving any reports about bed bugs in the terminal or other areas of the airport.
Bedbugs were prevalent in the early 20th century but, after potent insecticides were introduced, people managed to get rid of the bloodsucking critters for a while, between the mid-1950s to the late 1990s. But they came roaring back in the last five to seven years and mass travel is a major contributing factor to this.
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