Air India — Air India Horror

Address:

Mumbai City, Maharashtra

On 13.12.2014, we were to fly to London from Mumbai by AI 131. The flight was scheduled at 7am and the website stated a delay of 3 hours on the night of 12.12.2014. We did not receive any intimation from Air India and would not have known had we not checked flight status. As we arrived at the airport at 7am the next morning, we were told that the flight was in fact 16.5 hours delayed and that all passengers had been informed. Again, we did not receive any such intimation. Further, they insisted that they had boarded all their other passengers on a 4am British Airways flight, in clear contradiction to their above statement, not to mention the sheer impossibility of asking passengers to PRE-PONE their journey. Add to this, we were harassed for a good half an hour as the staff threw up their hands and exclaimed there was nothing to be done, but wait till the next day as the flight had now been CANCELLED altogether. Here, it must be noted that my co-passenger had spent the night at the Mumbai airport, having arrived from Kolkata the previous evening. Despite sitting right in front of the customer care desk all night, he had not been informed of any of these developments. In particular, we would like to express our deep dissatisfaction with the behaviour of one Ms. Michelle. After much deliberation, she finally agreed to put us on a flight to Delhi and then on another one from there to Heathrow. Also, we had been given coupons to avail free breakfast at the airport owing to the delay but the cafe in charge of doing so had not been intimated. Hence, another round of harassment and waiting around as numerous calls were made to confirm whether in fact respectable international jet-setters were entitled to free breakfast or attempting to rip-off a paltry cafe. Our entire travel schedule had been thrown into disarray. We had missed the last train to Liverpool for the 13th and had to spend the night at London and proceed to Liverpool the following day. The accommodation that had been booked at Liverpool for the night of the 13th was also lost. The loss we faced cannot be expressed in mere monetary terms (although we lost train tickets worth a total of 370GBP due to repeated cancellations). Finally, it must be mentioned that the luggage that arrived from Kolkata was in shambles. The lock had been tampered with and the suitcase cannot be used anymore (loss of another INR 4000). Further, when we had complained about this at the customer desk during our return, the staff nonchalantly commented that this is not an unusual phenomenon! Needless to say, I am never travelling by Air India again. I sincerely hope they make amends to compensate for our losses.