Ten Reasons Why You Should Not Buy Flight-ticket for Air India
Delays, delays and delays: In the past few years, we had to travel on Air India for one reason or another. Once becuase my parents had booked their flight tickets already and we wanted to fly with them. Another time because they had a direct flight to the destination on the day and one more time, because again they had a ticket availability on the day when we wanted to return. But every single time, religiously all our incoming and outgoing flights were delayed for a varied time span of fourty five minutes to eight hours. By now you are probably thinking about bad weather as a reason right? But let me tell you otherwise. In all the six cases, we were delayed for no aparent reason, yes you heard me right. There was no bad weather or any other specific reason that we were given. All we were told was there is a delay and they didn’t know for how long.
No announcements: Having worked in the customer service industry for the past twelve years, I do know that there are times when things do go wrong. If at any point I know that there is going to be a delay in my work, the first thing I do is call up the customer and make them aware of the delay. And this is nothing special but a standard practice. Well, Air India surely doesn’t think that becuase all these times that we were waiting to board the flight, there were no announcements. So we just waited for an hour one time, without a single person making an announcement that there was going to be a delay due to some reason. After three hours of waiting and trying to get atleast one person from Air India who knew what was happening, we were told that the flight that was supposed to come to Mumbai Airport have gone to Ahmedabad to pick passengers there. Why, no one knew.
False Claims: So the direct flight fair that we paid to get a flight which would go directly from the starting to end point was suddenly turned into an indirect flight going via our destination. Just great ! And let me tell you that it’s not as if Air India has the cheaperst air fair, there are other airlines which you can choose from which would give you cheap fair if you select indirect flight to your destination. Anyways, not knowing how long we had to wait, we waited for another five hours before we boarded the flight and what we saw was unbelievable. The flight was double booked, yes double booked. So now we had two sets of people fighting over one seat. Can this get any better?
Booking is not confirmed: But it did get worse. Some of the people were then told that just becuase they had a ticket number on their ticket didn’t mean that’s their seat. Have you ever heard of such a logic? Aparently their booking was not confirmed but what confirmation do you need when you get a ticket in your hand with a seat number on it? So some of the people had to sit wherever the air hostesses made them sit. Some couples even had to sit separately and so on.
Summer heatwave: Have you ever thought of a scenario where you are sitting in a flight and its really hot, say like 98F? You must think I am joking. Think again. After the flight started we realised, something is not right. Oh, its the AC. Why is it so hot in here? So we called the air hostess and asked her about it and she said, she didn’t know and went away. After an hour or so (about 11:30 am in the morning as we were delayed to start with) it was too hot to even sit inside. And then we were told that this is a technical fault and they can’t do anything about it. I just couldn’t believe my ears.
No extra food or milk for emergencies: As though what was happening was not enough, we were told that becuase of the double booking, they are short on food and people had to eat whatever they were given. In my case it was cheese crackers and cola. My ten months old son then was not taking the heat in the flight very well and crying. We had to remove all his clothes but it still didn’t help. No one even came to help us. When we went to ask for some milk for him, we were told that the milk is finished. I had made three bottles but due the delay of several hours, those were already finished and he was asking for more. So we had to give him some water instead.
Customer service is a joke: Nothing against the people personally but you can see that there has been a long delay on your flight and there is child that’s feeling too hot and is crying because he doesn’t know how to express it any other way and what do the air hostesses do? They tell us to keep him quiet becuase the people in the first class were getting disturbed. Normally I am a very level headed person but at this point I lost my cool, and asked her if she wanted to try calming down a baby who is hungry and flushed? It was as if they wanted us to leave the flight with the baby because he was crying. I just thought this was the worst experience of customer service I had ever experienced in my whole life. Normally people are very caring towards babies but I had to meet these insensitive people on Air India’s flight, just my luck.
Lost baggage, how?: Now you are probably wondering that’s not unusual for people to lose their baggage right? Well, we had a stroller that we took with us in the flight and at the end of the flight when we asked for it, we were told it’s lost. How is that possible? When our’s was the only stroller on that flight and we were given a receipt to keep with the ticket which we had to give when we arrived at destination to get the stroller, how can it just dissappear? But it did and we were told to talk to someone at the Air India desk at heathrow airport in London. So went there and they told us we could pick from few strollers that they had collected from another flight. I just didn’t know what to say. So I could take someone else’s stroller as mine, just becuase it was there and what about that person? Or may be they would chose someone else’s. Things were getting too much for me by this time and we declined to take any one of those strollers and asked for claiming procedure.
No complaints possible: When we finally came at the Air India desk, we asked for complaints procedure and were told to write a compaint to their head office in India. So we came home and we put our experience in writing. We didn’t receive any response and after a month or so called the ticket agent and asked them to give us a number where we could talk to someone. The number we were given kept on ringing without anyone answering our calls no matter what time of the day you tried to call. We wrote three more times without any response and one time we even registered the post to make sure they were receiving it. After six months of trying hard just to complain we gave up.
Confession by one of the employees: Then the next time we went to the airport to drop one of our friends off, we heard one of the Air India employees telling the other person, I get free passes but still I prefer to fly by another airlines. It’s just not worth the hassle. It’s bad enough that I have to work for Air India but I surely won’t use them for my pleasure time with my family. At this point, I knew that I was never going to use them ever again. The humiliation I went through just on what was supposed to be a pleasant flight still causes me pain. And I wonder if people really treat each other in such inhuman ways? And by the way, I got 70% of the cost of the stroller (another clause from their policy) after 16 weeks of coming back from India.
So even if it was the cheapest air fair available, I will not put myself and my family through that experience again.
