My disastrous experience with Air India: 3 hours delay & misplaced bags

The plane is all set to taxi but we were not moving. 10 mins, 20 mins, 30 mins!!! Then an announcement is made, due to a technical snag we are docking back.

BHPian sinharishi recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

What a disaster Air India is! I want to share my experience from yesterday flying AI856 from Delhi to Mumbai. Booked AI856 on Sunday evening after seeing that AI is operating their new Airbus 350 on the route. Paid 2.5k extra over Indigo’s nonstop flights. I only wanted to fly Air India as they are the only airline that fly the big planes between Indian Teir-1 cities. Earlier in the year I flew in their 777 on the same route. Anyways, all excited to fly in the new A350, I book the tickets.

We arrive 2.5 hrs before departure at the terminal. We were asked to go to self check-in counter P. This is the fully automated check-in counter. The only human interference was AI staff helping folks with their bags if the machine fails to read the tag. Now if you end up with excess baggage here, you have to go all the way back to AI check-in counters operated by humans. I print the boarding pass and see instead of 16K and 16J, our boarding pass has 10E and 10F. I checked my Digi Yatra scan and it also showed 10E and 10F. Mistake I made is I did not check the seat numbers, mind you I paid 575 additional for these 2 seats.

I logged into AI website and just to make sure I get the seats I paid for I click on resend email. The email confirmation mentioned that I am booked for 16K and 16J. Slowly it started dawning upon me that the aircraft has been changed. I was cursing AI, I paid extra to fly the A350! No communication, whatsoever given to us by AI. A350 was substituted with a 15 year old A321 (VT-PPY). We board ontime, cursed my luck and told dad there is always a next time.

The plane is all set to taxi but we were not moving. 10 mins, 20 mins, 30 mins!!! Then an announcement is made, due to a technical snag we are docking back. The AC was barely working, people were complaining about it to the staff and the standard response once they fire up the engines it will work. We don’t dock back to the same gate, instead we are taken far away and we are parked next to the A350 that we were originally supposed to fly. I was getting excited, yes, put us on that A350.

After sitting 45mins more, we are asked to deboard the plane. Bus takes us back to the terminal and we go thru transfers, doing security check again to a different gate. Another aircraft again, this one was a A321 in operation since Aug 2009 (VT-PPQ). People started questioning the staff why are we put on the same flight when it had developed a technical issue, no one bothered to check the tailsign, staff had a tough time convincing them its a different aircraft.

Anyways, we finally depart at 6:15pm from the originally scheduled 2:45pm. In flight, they ran out of Veg food and my father was handed over some packed fruits. I too asked for veg but the crew requested me if I am not pure vegetarian can I accommodate with chicken and noodles, LOL. Since I work EST hours, I was expecting that I will be home by 730pm and pushed all my meetings post 8pm. With all the delays had to sit in the airport for additional 2 hrs so I can attend to my client meetings.

Change of aircraft wasn’t enough, they lost my baggage too. They will locate it at Delhi airport and try to find it. This was the last time I booked AI. No information on change of aircraft, very poorly maintained aircrafts, mismanagement all around and they had ZERO regrets on what happened yesterday.

The fully automated baggage drop machine too had developed a technical issue

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