Air India sucks

I realize this is going to be my first post of the new year. And it saddens me that it starts on such a sour note for one of my friends Subhayu, who had to suffer through a terrible travel ordeal on account of the folks at Air India. I am reproducing his email here - bear with us because it's slightly lengthy.
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Air India - National Airline or a National shame !!!

This is a absolutely true & horryfying experience that I just went through with our national airline - Air India. It was so traumatic for me that I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams. I have heard of stray incidents of various types happening with different people, just couldn't believe when ALL of those happened with me in 2 days. Here's my experience.

Day 1:

I walk into the Mumbai airport at 12.15 pm for a 14.55 pm flight to london. (AI 131). After about 40 minutes, AI counter representatives just start walking around and chatting amongst themselves. Maybe 15-20 minutes after that, someone raises some noise about their behavior and then they come out open stating that the flight was full and that the flight was overbooked. Now overbooking as AI puts it is a very common action that most airlines resort to, even in peak seasons such as the one I was travelling in. To my outmost surprise, they had overbooked a flight of 210 passengers (they fly a Boeing 767 for this flight) by 40 odd passengers. Absolutely ridiculous !!!. Thats when this whole saga of trauma began. We fought with the AI officials to come up with a reason and tell us what they were gonna do for us. But they refused to budge and did not give any reasonable explanation. After about 30 minutes of screaming and fighting the duty manager arrived at the scene and the very second statement he made was that we are going to put you guys in a 5 star hotel. The next possible flight that they could put us on was AI 101 which would leave at 7.10 AM the next morning. They couldn't arrange for any other flight citing that they were all full, but they did not confirm with anyone before making that bold statement, just because they wanted to save the buck for AI. My case was a bit complicated cause I had to make it to the US the next day on a American Airlines (AA) flight. So they promised me to rebook me on a different flight and also provide me a hotel accomodation in London since I wouldn't make it for my original flight.


After that around 14.00 pm, there was a change of shifts, which meant a new duty manager was to arrive and be briefed about the situation. Some passengers like me, decided to take the lead and explained him the situation. He promised us that he would take care of us and would assign a hotel and boarding passes ASAP. Before that he had to head to a small meeting for 15 mins. That 15 mins, took him 2 hours and then he comes and states that out of great difficulty he could get us to the next flight at 7.10 AM, which we should have always been given priority to board since we were bumped off our original flight. But he refused to check in our luggage and give boarding passes, asking us to come to the airport some 6 hrs in advance. We refused and decided not to budge, and maybe after an hour he agreed to check us in. Still no hotel and it was 5.00 pm. One of the fellow passengers lost his head since he was travelling with his 80 year old mom who was struggling to sit through this trauma. Another family with an infant just wanted to know if they r going to get a hotel and still no action on AI's behalf. Finally around 6.30 pm, they come out and say that they cannot find hotels for us and offer to put us up in the airport area, where they have some facilities. Some of us went and checked the facilities. There were some beds with some dirty linen, no bathrooms, no TV's, no kind of entertainment and full of mosquitoes which would definitely give you malaria before leaving india. One guy mentioned that he wouldn't even let his dog stay there in that room. Such were the facilities offered to passengers who paid full fare, after being promised 5 star accomodation. Little did we know that this was a beginning of what we had to go through. After that we all went to the duty managers office and sat there and he refused to give us priority. After forcing him to give us his attention and forcing him to inform his seniors of our position, he negotiated with us.

After about 2 hours of this, AI made another offer to us. Find a hotel on your own and get us the bill tommorow and we'll reimburse you. The ceiling limit was set to Rs. 5000 / passenger or Rs. 7000/family, which is really a small amount given the costs of hotels in mumbai. Anyways, we tried hard to negotiate with them to give us a reasonable limit since we would never get a decent hotel around the airport for that kind of money. Sensing that we weren't making much progress with this issue with AI after an hour of debating and they still looking or acting to look for hotels for us, some of us decided to take the offer and share rooms. To our surprise, AI said they would not give us cash and we would have to produce a bill after paying it on our own. Some of the passengers had no indian currencies, some students have very limited credit card limits which blocked them from taking this limit. So we again tried to negotiate, but with no success with the thick skinned inconsiderate AI people. Also at this stage, AI managers told us that turn up at the aiport only around 6.30AM next morning since AI 101 is delayed to 8.00 pm. That would give us an additional 1 hour of sleep. By then the next shift came into work who again argued with us that every airline rebooks and they are justified with their hostile behavior and actually gave us a hard time to even dispurse the mininal taxi costs to us. Finally, around 10.30 pm in the night after spending more than 10 hrs at the airport, some of us decided to take a cab and give it a shot to look for a hotel on our own. Found one at around 12 in the nite and spend the next couple of hrs trying to get some sleep.


Day 2:

Next morning when we got to the airport at 6.20 AM, we noticed the same story being repeated with the AI 101 passengers who were dumped thanks to us. Similar shouts and screaming and determined AI officials fending off all allegations of mismanaging reservations. Infact funnily, the AI desk officials kept blaming AI reservation ppl for messing things up and telling us that they couldn't do much about it since thats how its been since the past couple of years. One of the AI officials mentioned that the whole overbooking saga was going on for the past 7-8 days, but surprisingly they still did not have hotels booked and they just kept using their strategy to hold passengers in the airport until they got frustated and left on their own. Suddenly we get rushed stating that we were delaying the flight. To our surprise the flight is stated to be on time. So we go thru immigration and then identify our luggages and finally make it to the flight. It leaves as stated - i.e. at 8.15 AM.

During the flight, I fell sick with the previous days food. The moment we landed, I was throwing up and had a very hard time keeping myself hydrated. Go to the luggage claim area in london and after about 1 hour, AI official comes and says that they did not board some 20 passengers baggage. Guess what .... all the 20 ppl were from AI 131 flight. It was so ironic, that they did not board things like the old lady's wheel chair. Can u imagine that ? After all this .... they do that. Also, with AI, something else we learnt is there is no compensation for your baggage if they do not arrive with you. I tried to negotiate, but one of the AI london officials mentioned that they would not entertain any requests unless the luggage was lost for more than 48 hrs. Nice !!!Thot I was done and so I went to the AI customer service and asked for the 1 nite hotel stay that I was promised in bbay. AI flatly refused stating that their responsibility ends in London. They do not care anything beyond that. Infact this one lady in the AI customer service was so rude and so insulting that I was amused if this is what "Customer service" meant for AI. No other airline counter had such rude officials. I decided to wait and speak to the duty manager, who also refused but after he heard my traumatic story asked me to stay there for a bit. This is like 3 hours since I landed in London still trying to get something I was promised. Finally, he took pity on me and decided to give me a room for a nite and he was perhaps the only AI official who had backed his words with some real action. I went to the hotel & crashed thinking I was done with AI for good ....I was dreaming .... yes, I was. Next morning, I reach Gatwick and presented my booking details to AA to take my flight to the US. They see my booking and ask me for a paper ticket. AI did not give me any paper ticket. They just gave me a piece of paper and thats it. The reservation was a no go and they asked me to buy a new 1 way ticket to Raleigh. At that stage, I couldn't think of anything to do. But i remembered that my original booking was a refundable, changeable ticket. So AA looked up my old reservation and the lady at the counter did some magic and I made it to the my flight to Raleigh. AA tried to trace my luggage, still no information and I am still waiting for it after 40 hrs of my flight.


Apathy:

In this whole experience, the thing I was surprised by was the sense of accountablity (or lack thereof) of the AI employees. Its a true government organization where there is no accountablity and everyone is trying to pass the buck onto someone else and run away from the responsiblities. I pity the old parents, families with infants and foreigners who get screwed and swindled with this kind of treatment. The saddest part of my experience is the AI officials behaviours and no sense of urgency to deal with our issues. It just seems to be a every day issue at AI and I personally noticed so many people losing their heads at the AI counters. After this experience, I have decided that I am going to pay additional money and travel any other airline but AI. They simply do not understand a passenger's or a paying customer's plight after making them go thru such hell. Not to mention how bad the AI website is to dig out any details. A nation like India which is the world leader in IT, our national airline's website sucks and doesn't get me any reasonable information.I just felt that after this experience I need to let every Indian whom I know in the US know about this. AI will not get off the hook this easy. They need to learn a lesson and I am gonna put every effort in trying to do so. I have refrained intentionally from naming individual AI officials since I dont think that would help cause I believe its an organizational issue and the attitude needs to change from the top to bottom, just changing some officials will not make this airline any better.So adios AI .... national airline .... my ass.



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Tailpiece: My wife and I had a harrowing experience ourselves in India trying to fly Air Deccan. It's a long story by itself, but one that reeks of the same complete lack of accountability that Subhayu wrote about - this on the part of the employees of and the Air Deccan management itself. Anyways, its sad that so many of our country's people are continued to be treated like crap.