Air India - AIC > Reviews > Cheap, but not chearful

Author's product rating:   

Food Quality
Customer Service
Punctuality
Space
Value for Money

Advantages:	Its cheap and the only Airline that'll serve you a curry !
Disadvantages:	Understaffed, Check - in takes ages and service is slow

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Air India, the Airline that serves you curries! Great! And its cheap too Great! And if those are your priorities and dont mind waiting in LONG, SLOW queues then this is the Airline you. I flew from London to New York with Air India recently, which set me back next to nothing. The flight cost £200!! (£50 of which is Airport tax)so that's quite a good deal, I though. Once I got to Heathrow, though I began to see how they managed to keep their prices so low. Firstly, low prices attract loads of travellers, so the plane is alway filled to the last seat, no chance of stretching out on the plane. Loads of people also means loads of queuing. At the check-in desk there was only three ground staff. To get onto the plane, you had to go through a second security check, which means that all 500+ passengers have to queue up once again to have their bags scanned by ONE machine and each be individually searched. Great. The queuing does not stop there. On the runway, Air India has low priority in terms of take-off queues. They pay less for their take-off slot at Heathrow than other Airlines and therefore have to yield to anything that wants to take off before them. Great. So invariably you will arrive a little later than anticipated. Once you arrive in JFK, you have to queue again, whilst waiting for you luggage. First they unload all the luggage that was loaded in India, and I have to say, I have never seen so much stuff coming out of one plane before in my life. Every passenger had 2-3 Enormous suitcases + several boxes, its unbelievable! So you can imagine how long that took.... Anyway, next time I will invest the extra £50-70 to fly with a 'normal' Airline, because flying is awful enough as it is and all this extra discomfort is not for me. So unless you're strapped for cash, then I DO NOT recommend them. Price is really the only thing its got going for it.