Air Deccan: Expect the Unexpected

I have been watching / reading all these allegations and clarifications on verious media about the below par standard of service provided by Air Deccan, the low cost airline. It has been difficult to decide who is right, who is wrong. However, i dont need to rely on third party news anymore. I have first hand experience and now i know what to expect.

Today morning my brother took a flight to Bhubaneswar from Bangalore. Its departure time was 0655 hrs and arrival at Bhubanesar at around 1000 hrs. However he reached at around 1300 hrs only. i.e SIX hours for a journey which is supposed to be only TWo hours in a direct flight.

The flight was supposed to hop at Chennai. However, it first went to Coimbattur, then to Chennai and then to Bhubaneswar. May be there were too few passengers for the Coimbattur flight, so they cancelled it and boarded all of them to this flight. On top of it they do not offer you any refreshments. Such a shame. There is NO concern for the passengers at all. If you deliberately put passengers in trouble you should at least have the courtesy to offer free refreshments.

Anyways, thats my experience. Do share yours, only first hand please.

Indian Airlines – you thought they were bad…

Yeah i also had the same impression about our national carrier. But only until today morning. Over the weekend i spoke to one of their executives over phone to enquire about holiday packages. I picked up his phone number from their website and called him up even though it was late in sunday afternoon.

As expected he didn’t sound very pleasing and i was not comfortable talking to him. So obviously i stopped the conversation without really getting all the information i wanted. However, i thought i should give my feedback to the company and leave it to them to accept/reject it or treat it the way they want. That way at least i have done my duty.

Today morning i was surprised when i received an apology mail from a senior manager from Indian Airlines, thanking me for my feedback and promising to improve upon the service levels. The mail also contained apology from the executive i spoke to. I am pretty impressed with this gesture. Guess the airline is trying to improve on the quality and standards. We need to change our perceptions too and decide on the fate of it based on it current standards, not by its past.