Singapore Airlines has been directed to compensate a couple for issues with their business-class seats. Ravi and Anjali Gupta paid $1,600 for a flight from India to Singapore last year. A consumer-disputes commission found they experienced "mental agony and physical suffering."
Ravi and Anjali Gupta flew from Hyderabad, India, to Singapore in May last year, a roughly four-hour flight. They paid 66,750 rupees (about $800) for each business-class seat, as reported by India Today, India's most widely read weekly magazine.
The couple filed a legal complaint because the automatic recline feature of their seats wasn't working, according to India Today. Consequently, they felt like economy-class passengers, except for the extra legroom. They also stated that they were forced to stay awake throughout the journey.
A Singapore Airlines spokesperson told The Independent that the seats could still be reclined manually and that the crew proactively checked on the customers regularly, offering to manually recline the seat when needed.
Although the airline offered the couple 10,000 frequent-flyer miles each, they declined the offer. On April 26, local outlets reported that a consumer-disputes commission in Hyderabad ordered Singapore Airlines to compensate the Guptas.
Ravi Gupta is the director general of police in the Indian state of Telangana, of which Hyderabad is the capital. The compensation totaled 200,000 Indian rupees ($2,400), with half for the cost of the seats and the rest to compensate for "mental agony and physical suffering," per India Today.
A representative for Singapore Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside local working hours.
Singapore Airlines is one of the world's few five-star airlines, according to the Skytrax ranking, and was named the world's second-best business class last year, behind Qatar Airways. However, malfunctions like a non-reclining seat are not unheard of, even among top airlines. Emirates, which ranked third last year, faced a $3,300 lawsuit from a 20-year-old passenger last year who complained that his business class seat didn't recline and was stained.