When it comes to choosing the airline when going to India, I always stay away from Air India. Because AIR INDIA SUCKS. I have traveled with them once and had a very humiliating and horrifying experience.
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.
