Moments before a local travel agency could complete payment for a group of about 113 students travelling to Malaysia on Saturday to represent Kenya in an international chess competition, the booking portal of the airline closed in on them.
The result was chaotic scenes at the airport. Photos of stranded parents and students at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) were soon all over social media, giving a glimpse of the confusion and anxiety that had gripped the group.
The group was to depart from Nairobi on Saturday morning to Kuala Lumpur for the Commonwealth Schools Chess Championship scheduled from October 5 - 12, 2026.
But the booking hitch upended those plans, throwing the students, parents and organisers into a scramble for alternative flights.
“It was an error from our side,” said an apologetic Terry of Koisan Safaris, the travel agency handling the bookings.
“The deadline closed in on us before we could pay the USD 2000,” she added.
By the time the agency tried to clear the remaining balance, the airline’s ticketing deadline had elapsed.
"There was still a small balance to be paid," Terry explained, saying that the seats had been reserved already, but the tickets had not been fully issued.
This is where group airline bookings can get complicated. A reservation is not necessarily the same thing as a confirmed, paid-for ticket.
For group travel, an airline can hold a block of seats for a specified period while a travel agent finalises passenger details and payment.
The booking comes with a ticketing time limit. Once that deadline passes without ticketing, the airline’s system can automatically cancel the reservation and release the seats.
Scramble for alternative flights
It is what Terry described as the “ticketing time limit”. It was the small window between having the seats held and having them fully secured.
The agency then tried to reinstate the seats. But they were gone. Terry explained that group bookings are handled differently from ordinary individual bookings.
When booking a large group, she said, the travel agent deals with the airline’s headquarters or group reservations desk. In this case, the airline’s headquarters is based in the UAE.
When they engaged the airline after the booking had been cancelled, they were told the seats could only be reinstated on Tuesday.
However, for the students, Tuesday was too late. The chess games would already have begun, meaning the Kenyan team risked missing the competition.
The problem was therefore not simply finding another flight. The original group seats had been lost, while reinstatement was only possible after the competition had already started. The agency, she said, had to find another way of getting the students onto available flights.
“We tried our level best, and 40 students travelled on the same day,” Terry said, adding that it did not affect everyone, explaining that out of 113, 40 people travelled on the same day.
The remaining 73 were left scrambling for alternative arrangements. This is the group whose photos were awash the social media.
They were all supposed to leave on Saturday morning, but some of the 73 eventually travelled later that night. And others followed later on Saturday, with the last batch leaving on Sunday, Terry said.
“Kila mtu alisafiri (Everyone travelled). We had to find a solution, find money and (book). And now, everything is okay,” she said, explaining that they have landed safely on the other side.
For Terry, however, the weekend had been anything but easy. She said it had been a stressful weekend and that such a situation had never happened to her before. She apologised for the inconvenience.
As a parent, Terry said, she understood the panic caused by having children stranded at the airport. As the travel agent, she was also dealing with the uproar that followed.
“It is sorted,” an apologetic Terry said.
