The domestic airport seemed a little better than the international dump we were in for several hours. Jet Airways had a lot of counters; we had several hours so I made sure we would get on the flight. We couldn’t find any place to sit before the security check-in so we sat on a ledge along some plants. I found a STD (long distance) phone booth and made a call, browsed through a few small stores which were no bigger than 10 feet by 10 feet.

I noticed a TATA Indicom booth advertising wifi access. I was curious so I asked the lady about it. She said she didn’t know anything about it and the guy who really knew about it will be back in 10 minutes. I came back in 10 minutes; the guy was busy talking to someone on his mobile phone, it seemed like a personal call. After a few minutes he hung up and explained to me that they have a special promotion that will allow me to use wifi at the airport free for 30 minutes and each additional hour was about $1.25 and the signal was available everywhere in the airport (he pointed to the two ends of the airport; it wasn't a big airport). I took the free card. Right next to their kiosk, the signal strength was poor although I did not loose the connection. I thought that was odd. I checked my email and browsed a few websites and 30 minutes were almost up.

After the security check at we couldn’t find any seats again; there were a lot of people sitting on the floor; my son was sleeping so my wife decided to sit on the floor while she was holding him. I walked around and tried to find an empty seat; there were a bunch of people with luggage on the seats; they didn’t seem to care for woman and children having to stand or sit on the floor. Most Indian airports are not equipped with Jetways; you have to take a bus to the aircraft. When they started to board our plane I found out that we have to go through another security check by Jet Airways. Not sure why they have multiple security checks one right after the other; either Jet Airways doesn’t trust the government security checks since they compete with them or they’re afraid of someone getting in to secured areas by bribing the security guards. We had our luggage scanned and received the wand treatment and we boarded a bus and we were driven to our aircraft which was a small propeller type of plane.

While going up the stairs on the plane; I noticed our luggage being loaded in the back of the plane; it was a small plane and it didn't carry luggage in the belly. There was a guy at the bottom of the stairs who checked our boarding pass; another guy at the top did the same thing. I know there are a lot of people in India and they all need jobs but this was an overkill; there were a few othere guys near the plane watching the luggage being loaded. I didn't care how many people there were as long as I got my seat on the plane.

Bombay Domestic Airport remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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At about 7am we are told that they may have a 1pm flight for us. We stand in another line and Jet Airways employees don’t get what we’re saying. We have to go back to the bald guy and have him come with us to explain to Jet Airways what flight we are supposed to be on. We’re issued boarding passes for a 1:10pm flight.

I wanted to go to the domestic airport and just wait there; I’ve been there before and It’s a little better airport. I asked the bald guy about our options and he reluctantly said he can offer us a hotel; I read some reviews like this one where Air India puts you in a roach motel and you’re worse off going into the city filled with people to rip you off. I was extremely reluctant. He said the hotel would be Sahara just across the domestic airport and they would provide transportation. It had been almost 30 hours since we left Chicago and we were tired and I only had about 4 hours of sleep. I could not think straight; I asked him how long to get the hotel shuttle and he said 5 minutes.

He made a call to the hotel and asked them to come right away. We were standing outside of the security in front of the air India desk/cabin. They have this 8 feet by 8 feet poorly lit office; sort of like a toll booth behind a glass enclosure. We stand and wait by this office for about 15 minutes, there is no signs of the shuttle. There are other customers with problems; this one employee is often rude to the customers asking them to step aside or go away. We’re told to go outside “near door 83” and wait for the shuttle. We go outside and there is a sea of people, most of them wearing white; they seem to be waiting for people coming back from middle east. These people were muslims waiting for first flight to come back from Hajj. As we go outside this Indian security personnel asks us where we were going, I said we have to go to Sahara hotel. He thought we meant Sahara airport and asked us to go back inside and catch the shuttle. I explained that we are waiting for a shuttle to the hotel. He let us out of the airport.

We found the “door 83”, it was behind the Air India office on the other side. The door number was about 1 inch high; we could have easily missed it. The weather was really warm. I felt that most people were staring at us. One of the biggest problem was that there were a lot of huge mosquitoes. I got bit several times; I noticed a fan inside the Air India office; I asked if my son can stand inside near the fan so he wouldn’t be bit by mosquitoes. They said he can stand here but the fan doesn’t work. There were even more mosquitoes inside. Around 7:45am, an unmarked SUV arrived; the driver was from Sahara Hotel. We quickly got inside, there were a few other people with us trying to load their luggage. After about 10 minutes we started towards the hotel.

I expected the airport area to be clean with lush trees, may be palm trees. It was anything but that; you can see pretty much entire area was run down and the traffic was pretty bad. One of the first thing I noticed was the air had a lot of dust like there was a dust storm recently.

Bombay International terminal (1A) from outside

The hotel was a couple of miles away; on the way I saw a Hyatt and Sheraton; both looked impressive compared to their surroundings. I was afraid that our hotel was going to be another dump; from the outside it looked okay; the lobby was nice and clean with fresh flowers. There were a couple of people behind the counter. They were slow in checking us in. We took the elevator to the third floor and walked for a minute to our room. More than half of the hotel was under construction. The rooms were okay, similar to a holiday inn in the US.

Getting a flight out of Bombay remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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My wife stands in the line or somewhere in the crowd and I guard the luggage and watch my son. After a few minutes I hear yelling and arguments between two passengers in the crowd; tensions are high and everyone wants to make it on the flight. This goes on for about half an hour; I can see the customs counter from where I’m standing and see more people being harassed and forced into paying bribes.

My wife gets to talk to the bald guy behind the desk; he gives her a voucher but tells her that our tickets are “not confirmed”. WTF? We already had boarding passes for the flight we missed. I confirmed the tickets on AirIndia.com myself. This airindia.com link shows that US passengers don’t need to reconfirm their tickets.

Air India was giving out vouchers to put people on Jet Airways flight for 10am. There was a 6am flight but everyone there would miss it. We tried to ask the idiot behind the desk about this “not confirmed” business and he didn’t have any other answers and repeated himself. He said you can stand in line for Jet Airways and if they have room they will take you.

So we stand in this line which is 10 feet away from this guy’s tiny temporary desk; Jet airways is scanning everyone’s luggage; we just came through an international flight still behind security; what’s the need to rescan the bags? There are two desks open and they’re moving people extremely slow. It took almost an hour to get our bags scanned and get up to the Jet Airways “transfer” desk to ask them if they have room for us. One hour standing in line at a US airport would have been paradise compared to this airport is a run down hellhole filled with mosquitoes, foul smell, and dripping pipes overhead. I wanted to assume it was just water. I wanted to take pictures but I was afraid that I might be detained and harassed. All of this including customs is happening in the same area; I can see the customs desks; luggage belts; and Jet airways counter from where I’m standing. The place is not bigger than a high school gym.

There are no public phones in the area so we can call and inform our family who might have come to the other airport to pick us up. The phones are outside the security and I didn’t feel like venturing out there because I might not be able to get inside.

There are restrooms that are being attended by multiple genitors who are there waiting for you to tip them; my wife took my son to the restroom and there were four female genitors inside, one of them asked “what do you want to do?”

Jet Airways employees told us that you’re not “our list” and Air India has not “confirmed you”. They said they could not do anything about it. I asked if they had room in the business class to which she replied “there is no business class” on our flights. I asked if there was a later flight, she said she can get me on a 4:55pm flight which was 12 hours away. So we are left with standing there like victim of Katrina hurricane in a very similar hellhole with no idea what’s going to happen next. The bald air India employee was no where in sight and there were a few other passengers with similar problems. We all met each other and I quickly understood what had happened. All of our last names were at the end of the alphabet. Air India bumped us all because there was limited seating on the Jet Airways flight and we were at the end of their list.

Any other airline would have remedied the situation by offering compensation to volunteers to make everyone happy. Instead we were lied to, discriminated against and they made us stand in line for hours with a toddler. They could have leveled with us; offered us accommodations; and confirmed us on a later flight. That could have saved us from the emotional rollercoaster and we could have gotten some rest. Air India doesn’t work this way; they don’t care about their customers; some bureaucrats make the decisions who don’t have a clue about customer service. They should be hit with a class action law suit and banned from providing service until they clean up their act.

The Shiite hits the fan remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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As we walked down the hallway, we were asked if we had a connection to Bangalore, Hyderabad or Madras; they had some information for people connecting to those flights. When I asked a few air india personnel for Ahmedabad we were told “downstairs”. This is the same way you go to clear immigration and customs. I was surprised but no one was there to answer any questions. We just went along with rest of the people. My gut feeling was there was something wrong. We stood in line for the immigration, in a couple of minutes we were cleared through immigration and went towards baggage claim. We’re supposed to be doing this at our final destination and not in Bombay. At the baggage claim we found other passengers wondering the same thing.
We found one of the airport staff who explained that our connecting flight was cancelled or already taken off and we would be told what to do by the airline after we get out of customs.

So we stood at the baggage claim with about two hundred other tired passengers expecting that our baggage would arrive soon. There were only two or three belts and we were the only flight so it wasn’t like they had a lot to do. A few bags trickled in after a few minutes…every five minutes a few more would trickle in. it took us about an hour to get our bags. I checked to see if they had marked our bags with an “X”, this would mean that our bags were to be searched by hand at customs. I didn’t see any. During this hour my son was getting restless, he kept wanting to play with the luggage belt and almost got knocked down by a moving bag. We also met a couple of people from Chicago whom we knew, one of them was a professor at Harper college and another was an elderly lady.

At this point we don’t know how we would catch another plane to get home, we were among many people in a big heard trying to get our bags and clear customs. We were treated more like cattle than airline passengers.

Treated like cattle (in the western sense) remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Ellora - name of Air India's plane. Ellora is famous for its caves -- hummm, may be they shouldn't have named this plane Ellora.

The entertainment system was still broken; in fact they showed the same movies again. How is this possible? Don’t these people have a log? May be it was an opportunity for you to catch the part of the movie you may have missed due to audio and tracking issues during the first leg of the flight. I noticed a couple more channels with same English/German audio issue. This time I didn’t inform anyone.

We were given customs and immigration forms an hour or so before we landed. Before I start filling out our forms, a hand grabbed my arm from behind; it was an elderly woman who was occupying all four seats behind us. She made those seats into her own bed throughout the flight. Apparently she was the only one who was felt like Maharani on the flight.
She asked me if I can help her fill out her form because she didn’t know how to write in English. I went next to her and filled out her form and moved her luggage the way she wanted it.

The forms stated that we were allowed to bring in 12,000 rupees worth of stuff free of duty. This was about 300 dollars per person. So we had 600 dollars of allowance before we would have to pay a dime in duty. We were not bringing any where close to that amount. I had nothing of value that I would leave behind and my wife had bought some gifts of no more than $200.00 in value. So I declared $100.00 for each of us. I did not expect to pay a dime in customs and since our customs were done in the local city of Ahmedabad (AMD) we were certain that there would be no harassment. The very reason we chose Air India was this so we can avoid customs in Bombay (read the 2nd blog entry).

Right before we landed into Bombay, they sprayed the plane with anti mosquito spray. I have noticed other airlines doing the same, apparently no one wants mosquitoes on the airplanes but they are welcome on the airport.

I was relieved that my son had slept through most of the flight. We were very worried about him not wanting to sit in one seat for over 16 hour.

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Frankfurt airport doesn’t have a lot of seating options outside the gate so I was standing in the middle of the airport observing people when I saw this guy and he saw me at the same time. It was one of my co-workers who sat nearby in the office. We both couldn’t believe that we met in Germany. He was on the same flight. We shared some flight experiences and decided to have a German beer at the airport. The airport restaurant/bar/shop employees were going through a shift change so they didn’t pay attention to us for several minutes. They were busy counting their money; I finally asked if they were open and one of them said “yes” and began counting again. Finally one of them took our order and we were served a couple of cold beers. As we sat there talking about various things, someone else came by and introduced himself and his family. I knew him from college but couldn’t remember his name right away. We got back on the plane at the last minute; I had lost my overhead space for my computer bag, I settled for some space four rows away.

Hey, I know you remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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The plane had 3x4x3 configuration having 10 seats per row in the economy section. I quickly found my wife and son and put away my luggage. There was another passenger in our section of the four seats. He had already introduce himself to my wife and son. I assumed he was going to Germany. I decided to take the aisle seat and the other elderly gentleman had the other aisle seat. My wife and son were in the middle. As we settled in, he introduced himself as Jim, he was from Oklahoma and he said he was going to India for the first time. He seemed like a down to earth person from the south, talked a lot and barely fit in his seat. He noticed one of the flight attendant who was extremely skinny (sort of like alley Mcbeal) and commented that he could tell right away she was not an American (obviously because of her weight, it was not a racist comment).

We were offered orange juice before the take off, most of the flight attendants were quiet responsive and courteous. We took off around 11:15am after over 4 hours of delays.

During or soon after the take off they showed a safety video at the end of which they had a how to section on using the “toilets”.

To my knowledge Air India is the only airline that does this because the soon after the take off lavatories won’t pass a third world standard in some of the cases. It's probably not the airline's fault but they do a little to keep the bathrooms clean. It seems that some passengers don’t know or don’t care about personal hygiene, germ theory or courtesy to others. I got a picture of this announcement on my digital camera.

The air plane did seem it was from the 80’s because the screen resolution was really bad and everything squeaked a lot.

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I noticed that 95% or more of the passengers were Indians including a lot of elderly people and kids. My son found a little playground for kids near the gate and he kept busy until the boarding started. I struck up a conversation with a homeland security agent who was there to assist foreign passengers leaving the country with the kiosks that were setup around the airport to finger print and print a record of foreigners leaving the country; he was an older Indian guy and said he had worked there for several years. He started asking me about computers and international telephony. I was surprised to learn that he knew very little about computers or telephony in general especially because he helped people with the computerized kiosks. He didn’t know how to write a URL which I gave him, I had to write it down for him. While I was talking with him, a young air-india employee with ill fitted suite came by and interrupted our conversation. The Air India employee said to the DOHS employee that he will be leaving as soon as this plane leaves and “we’ve already made one general announcement, no need to make any more announcements.” It was 10:15pm at this time and the plane was still at the gate and boarding had not yet begun. The display behind the gate still read 10:00pm. The customers were starting to line up outside the gate in anticipation of an announcement.

It was around 10:30pm they announced “boarding rows 70 to 84”, no pre-boarding for first class, business class, or for people with children. Since we were in row 36, we were stood behind everyone expecting to board at the end. I made a comment that they should let the kids board first. One of the fellow passenger over heard me and suggested we should just bypass the line and go to the front and try to board. I didn’t feel comfortable doing this so I let my wife and son go, they were allowed to board ahead of most of the people. There were other passengers with kids and disabled passengers boarding this way after they saw my wife and son board.

I was amazed that there were no announcement stating the flight would be delayed even more and if there was a pre-boarding for passengers with kids and/or disabled passengers. I felt sorry for those first and business class passengers who stood in line with the rest of us to board.

Waiting to board remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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We had about two hours before the boarding so I decided to chill out at the airport bar, the waiting area at O’hare was packed because of Air India delays and other flights leaving at the same time. I managed to order a beer and spent time talking with my brother and his family and watching my son run around the airport lounge. I had to leave my CDMA Treo 650 behind since it wouldn’t work in India. It was difficult but I let my brother take it back for me. I felt disconnected from the world.

At O'HARE remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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I looked at airindia.com when I got home and as expected it said the flight was on time. AirIndia.com is usually not updated in real time because that would be good customer service and that would go against the airline's image. So we call the dreaded recording (they don't have any live person answering the phone; they have a not so personalized recording for their daily flight in and out of Chicago) which confirmed the delay.

With that knowledge we had some extra time to kill and go over our list to make sure we didn't forget anything. I created this blog and wrote the first entry. I took care of a few details with the house including lowering the temprature to 55 degrees.

We loaded up all the luggage in two cars and left home around 6pm to catch the 10pm flight to Ahmedabad (AMD) via Bombay (BOM) and Frankfurt, Germany.

And we are off...may be not remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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I really wanted to try the new American Airlines ORD to DEL non-stop flight. However, the flight arrives in Delhi at 9:30pm and there are no connecting flights until next morning at around 8am. This means that I'd have to spend the night at the airport or get a hotel for the night; not to mention that it will also require going through customs in New Delhi and then we'd have to take all my luggage (that would be 5 large bags and 3 carry on bags) to the domestic airport by ourselves and check-in again or take it to the hotel. Don't know why AA doesn't partner with a domestic airline to offer through check-in and have better flight timings so connecting flights are within a few hours.

I wrote to AA asking about this, their reply was the flight times were decided based on how many flights can connect going out of ORD; seems like they don't care what happens with their passengers once they leave their aircraft. They promised to look into it.

This left me with a couple of other choices, I can go to London on a late flight from ORD, arrive in London in late morning and then take Air India non-stop evening flight from London to Ahmedabad (AMD). When I checked with a couple of travel agents they told me that they don't or can't sell me the LHR-AMD ticket; probably because non one asks for it and their consolidator doesn’t ask carry it because of the low volume from US. I was surprised that a travel agent could not sell me a ticket with such competition in the business from online sources. I checked on expedia and Orbitz, they did offer it but I wasn't sure if AA or UA will offer through check-in on Air India; it seemed like I would have to take my luggage in LHR, may be go through customs and check in again since the flights were about 10 hours apart. Since there were a lot of unknowns, I decided not to go with this option.

Another option was in back of my mind was Singapore Airlines; I have been following them for a while and they have a connecting flight from Singapore to AMD once or twice a week. They are ranked as #1 airline along with Cathay Pacific. I checked the prices and timings; it was about 2000 dollars (about $600 more than avg. ticket price) and it required travelling through LAX, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore to get to AMD; total trip time was about 33 hours one way.

The last option was <insert your favorite expletive here> Air India. The only reason being they offered a transfer at Bombay (I'm not going to call it Mumbai, deal with it). You can transfer to a local connecting flight without having to go through customs and immigration checks at BOM and the trip time was about 21 hours. I don't care about me so much but it would be really easy on my wife and son to come back on their own.

So left with not very good options, I reluctantly decided go to India on Air India with very very very very low expectations. As long as I don't die, what's the worse that can happen? When I made this decision my gut feeling told me that this was a stupid decision and something will go wrong.

Choosing the airline remains copyright of the author Infidel J, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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