Air India and the Barbone: how it turned out (#spoileralert there's a happy ending)
After recounting my misadventure with Air India and having managed to return home safely, [...]
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After recounting my misadventure with Air India. and after being able to return home safely, it is time to tell how it turned out.
Small summary of the previous episode
In this article:
I was in Australia with Marika and Bete when our return flight was partially canceled, the proposed re-routing (spending 40 hours in New Deli) did not work for us for various reasons but from the company came a kind of ultimatum either that or cancel the return and we refund you.
The first part of the journey
We arrived in New Delhi around 5 p.m. on Thursday, October 31, about 40 minutes late and after spending 12 hours flying without IFE because the entire entertainment system of the entire Boeing 787 stopped working, or it would be better to say that it was working for us, but since it was giving some people no signs of life, the crew opted for a hard reset of the entire plane: for about 20 minutes the power outlets, the seats, the seat lights, and of course the screens did not work.
Then slowly it all came back to life, including the IFE, which, however, for about 10 hours was completely stuck on the home screen for the whole plane!
When we arrived in India, we headed to the transit desk to try to figure out what other viable options were and here's the first wrinkle: the transit counter inside the airport is a mere protocol office: they can only print out your new boarding pass and/or endorse the one you have. Nothing else.
We are asked to leave, retrieve our bags and go to departures. Too bad that to enter India you need a visa and no one from the company thought to ask if we were in compliance or not. When asked, the attendant told us, "If you do not have a visa, I will call my colleague who will arrive in about 60 minutes and we will give you a paper to give to immigration" !!!
Fortunately, however, we had been prescient and applied for a visa.
The tug and pull
If you have never been to India and New Delhi in particular, I consider what is a self-proclaimed best airport in South Asia to be one of the worst in the world, perhaps even worse than Cairo and Marrakech. Retrieving our luggage, we went up to the departure floor. Here, however, you cannot enter the check-in area without going through army checkpoints and showing a boarding pass.
A little color note: It was the first day of the Diwali festival, the airport and workers (almost) all dressed up, it felt like we were at a bolliwood-style wedding and not an airport. The festival of lights lasts for 5 days and it really began on October 31
Upon reaching the only spicule of terminal open to the public where there are company counters but not even a bathroom, a kind of comedy of the absurd began with the addition that there is no public wifi in the airport, unless you have a coupon that is of course issued inside the airport and upon scanning your passport.
The first attendant, in her beautiful sequined gown with an awkward manner in the order:
- He pretends not to understand the issue
- Proposes to cancel the ticket
- Try to argue by saying that the planes are all full
I ask to speak with a supervisor, she for the umpteenth time picks up her cell phone and points me to her colleague, with whom she was on the phone and who was sitting less than 5 m away distance. I thought I was on a joke.
We begin the explanation again, and the first thing the "supervisor" in an even better suit says to me is, "But how did you get out, did you have a visa?" At this point I really think I am in some kind of comic especially when she also says to me, "There are no seats on any flights departing Nov. 1. Sold out for London, Frankfurt and Paris.". I look at her I take out my cell phone and Thanks to St. Airalo and the power of eSIMs I open the Air India website and try to buy 3 business class tickets to London, there are seats on all 3 flights departing November 1.
And here comes Il coup de théâtre. She looks at me, looks at her monitor, and like it's nothing she says, "But didn't my colleague tell you there are seats to London?" That is, one second she tells me there are no flights and then she puts the blame on her colleague. He picks up his cell phone and calls the first colleague and after 10 minutes of unintelligible words he tells me, "Go ahead to my colleague who will give you tickets, for flight AI 161 that leaves at 2 a.m. to London."
Penalty is when referee blows the whistle
The wise Vujadin Boškov taught to wait before celebrating and in fact back to the first attendant she asks us for our passports and then says, "but who said there were no seats for London?" I, increasingly baffled, just tell her that I wanted to go to the lounge to shower and relax and that my daughter was hungry. After about 5 minutes we had our tickets in hand and he explained which counters to go to for check-in.
We walk to the check-in counters, it's 6:30 p.m. and the flight leaves at 2 a.m. If it was a low-cost airline, they wouldn't let us check in, but here everything is open and there are flights at all hours, what do you want to happen. We go through the military checkpoints, reach the counter indicated and here the bitter surprise: "You have to wait until 8:30 p.m., before that we can't let you check in."
The most absurd thing is that the dedicated desks were regularly manned, but for an unspecified security reason it was not possible to check in and go to the lounge. Here between "workers" intent on taking selfies and people exchanging greetings worse than at Christmas I talk to an attendant who "pretends to understand" tells me I'm trying to resolve the situation and then disappears as if he were David Copperfield in Las Vegas.
The last mile
We have no choice but to camp out in the worst airport in the world, without even being able to go outside anymore because the military does NOT let you out of the terminal, with no wi-fi, almost no chairs, and only one micro-bar. At 8:30 p.m. we make it to the gates on time, where everyone keeps taking pictures and playing with their cell phones and we are told, "Not yet, maybe 8:45 p.m., but sometimes 9:30 p.m."
We practically sit in front of the counters waiting, every 15 minutes we go to the attendant who is 5 meters away from us and always says no, we stare at her, and she looks at us almost sympathetically. At 9:45 p.m. we see people coming in and we get up and she says, "It's been open for 10 minutes." I felt like running her over with my suitcases, but I was too tired.
Not all evil comes to harm
I could have insisted that we be re-routed to Paris or Frankfurt as well, but I strategically chose London because on LHR Air India flies its flagship twice a day, the emblem of the new company: the A350.
A completely different world, and I'm not just talking about the spectacular configuration chosen by the TATA group, the new owner of the Indian carrier, but especially for the quality of on-board service, catering and attention to detail that teleported us from one of the worst companies in the world, to one that could contend for a place in the Top 5 and battle even with Qatar for the overall throne, but that is another story and I will tell it soon on TFC's YT channel.
The end
We arrived in London rested, refreshed and happy. We also managed to catch a flight with BA to Malpensa much earlier than we thought and arrived home that it was still daylight and points already credited on our frequent flyer cards. And they lived happily ever after.
