Relatives of 24 tourists from Pimpri-Chinchwad who were in Pahalgam when the attack struck say they cannot get answers from either the tour operators who sold them the packages or the government control rooms set up to assist stranded travelers.

The families told The Times of India that calls to the operators handling the bookings went unanswered after news of the incident broke. Official helplines and control rooms, they said, have likewise failed to provide information on the whereabouts or condition of the 24 travelers.

The tourists had traveled to the Kashmir Valley on package tours booked through private operators, according to the report. When the families tried to confirm whether their relatives were safe, evacuate them, or simply establish contact, neither channel produced a response.

For sellers of travel, the episode exposes a structural weakness in how emergency response is handled across the distribution chain. Package tour operators act as the point of sale and the contractual counterparty, but in a crisis the families of travelers on the ground discovered that the operator's phone lines — the same ones used to close the sale — offered no support. Government control rooms, the designated fallback, also could not answer queries about specific missing travelers.

The 24 tourists from Pimpri-Chinchwad, a township near Pune in Maharashtra, were in Pahalgam at the time of the attack. Their kin have been waiting for confirmed information on their status and location.

The breakdown in communication cuts both ways for the trade. Operators who cannot account for their customers during an incident face immediate reputational damage in their source markets, and destinations that cannot run functioning crisis helplines risk bookings across the region, not just in the affected valley. Jammu and Kashmir's tourism sector had been recovering strongly before the attack, and the handling of the aftermath will shape how source markets in western Maharashtra and beyond assess the risk of booking Kashmir packages.

No information was available from the tour operators involved or from the control rooms on when the families might receive updates on the 24 travelers.