Air India – Achieving Customer Nausea!

Customer Nausea is, as you might have guessed, at the other end of the spectrum from Customer Delight! Striving hard to achieve this major milestone is Air India. They have turned convention on it’s rear-end.

I was in Mumbai this weekend, to receive a relative of mine, flying in from Kolkata on an Air India flight.

Gosh, the flight was over 45 minutes late!

Funny, we think a 45-minute-late flight is not only pardonable but also a sign of improving things when it comes to the public sector airlines! Happy as I was, I started discussing the enormous changes that the Aviation Ministry was bringing in to modernize our airports. A rather boring conversation for my wife though.

Haha. Air India had another trick up its sleeve. It wouldn’t have given up so easily when it comes to inconveniencing its passengers. It just could not. We know it takes about 20 minutes for people to leave the airport once the flight has landed. But when that stretched to 30 minutes I attributed it to all the construction that was happening at the terminal.

The 30 minutes stretched to 1 hour. The official response was that the luggage was “Arriving in another 10-15 minutes”. We all know the 48-hour clock PSUs refer to when talking time. So we felt that by 30 minutes we should be happily on our way. Conversation had changed to how taxes are paying for lazy government officials. And my wife was participating.

After the end of an hour and 30 minutes, luggage still hadn’t arrived from the plane to the conveyor. Official response was still “Arriving in another 10-15 minutes”. The luggage did arrive but not before it took all of 2 hours. The flight from Kolkata to Mumbai was 2 hours 30 minutes, and the luggage took 2 hours to reach the conveyor from the plane. This must be a record of sorts in Customer Nausea!

I now want Laloo as the Minister for Civil Aviation.