Yeah you guys read it right. It took me 17 hrs to travel from Pune to Lucknow by air. Though initially it wasn’t expected to be such a difficult and challenging (in terms of lack of sleep and time) trip. I had booked my tickets with Kingfisher IT – 3149 from Mumbai – Lucknow on 31st October at 5:30pm. A simple 2 hr journey right? WRONG! The so called luxurious airline “Kingfisher – Fly the Good Times” announced the cancellation of their flight by sending what; a simple SMS.
I have written an entire blog post on Trakin about how hard the only 5 star airline in the country is trying to degrade its luxurious and customer centric image. PLEASE DO READ IT!
http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/10/31/kingfisher-customer-support-bad/
An excerpt from that post!
After the flight was cancelled, they just messaged the passenger saying that the flight has been cancelled and he / she needs to call the call center. Is this what one expects from a customer centric airline which calls itself the best in India?
They should have instead called / emailed or probably contacted the said person on social networks and given a personalized response. Probably it may be too difficult. But then this is something which can make a difference between a negative and positive word–of–mouth.
The calls at the call center weren’t picked up. Now this is a problem I have seen in many organizations and companies . If they don’t pick up, then the basic point of such a facility with 4-5 nos. just doesn’t make much sense right? Proper scheduling, managing the peak and load times and queuing of calls in the best possible manner are the most important things to do in such a scenario.
So after the bus journey of about 3.5 hrs from Mumbai to Pune, I was there at the Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport – Terminal 1A by 6:30pm. I was pretty happy thinking that my flight for Delhi was just around 3.5 hrs away. Since there wasn’t anything great to eat outside and I saw what seemed like a nice Food Court inside, I checked in around 8pm when I came to know that the flight had been conveniently delayed till 11:30pm. The reason for the delay “Heavy congestion at Mumbai airport and airspace” was atrocious to say the least when all flights of Air India which is the worst many a time in this regard were running on time.
So the next couple of hours were spent in walking around the airport, eating at Idli.com, surfing the free net, talking to people or just idling time by checking out the latest books in Media Mart. Finally our flight IT 313 took off at 12:30am and reached Delhi around 1.5 hrs late. And then the wait started at terminal 1D for the next flight Kingfisher IT – 3651 to Lucknow at 7:30am on 1st. That flight got delayed by half an hour too. The journey finally ended in Lucknow at 9am on Monday.
The only good things were the food in IT 313 and the free internet connection in both the airports :P. One thing I would like to convey here is that after the 5 star rating given to it by Skytrax and many other awards for luxury and customer service, the success has gone to Kingfisher’s head that they have lost it.
The call centers, Twitter usage, on time performance, style of speaking English (I am pointing out this because of the poise and grace they are taught) was all HORRENDOUS!!!
It just seems Kingfisher its trying its best to be the WORST LUXURIOUS AIRLINE OF THE COUNTRY!