In Air

At the end of it all, I finally made it to the homeland. My friends had appraised me about how consistently Air India usually screws up but even by that standards, a 48 hour journey for a 24 hr one was a stretch.

The part that worked perfectly was the Air France part from Munich to Paris. After that, it was at the mercy of Air India. They did not deem it important that the passengers should know when they would be taking their flight to India. After all, a 12 hr delay is only incidental.
The only good thing about the flight was the party atmosphere in the flight. Based on my prior Lufthansa flights where we had to sit stiff and be favored by the crew, this was a great one. Everybody talks to everyone else. The air hostess was fun refusing to give me a pillow because 'she was busy' (to quote her words). She says, I have no non-vegetarian but I can give you as much booze as you want. I found all of this so funny. Made me wonder...is this the face of the country?

At the end of it all, we knew most of the other people in the flight and had exchanged business cards. Call it 'networking in the air'.

But then the worst was to come. A long 10 hr wait in Mumbai with the rain gods not in the best of moods. While Mother Nature has her own ways of getting attention, Air India really came up short on making life easier for the passengers. We had no clue as to when the next flight out was. They said 1 am and finally we took off at 4 am the next morning.

There was this French couple along with me. I could actually sense the frustration that was building up in them. They werent sure if they will get their baggage and also as to what the gate was and at what time etc. The whole thing seemed a bit amateurish to me, the way, Air India handles this whole thing. I think we have a long way to go before we can be a good tourist location. I am just suprised that so many tourists are still coming to India even with the amount of complications that they have to go through. There are so many basic things that can be done right without even making major investments for example by just putting enough people to help out the foreign tourists and provide them with information (after all, people are not a scarce commodity here). We can do all the marketing but if we cant follow up this with the basics back here, we can never be a serious contender for the 'share of wallet' in the tourism industry.