Earlier Experiences:  After a very long time I was traveling in Air Sahara on 05th Jan, 2007 and had a very bad experience, which I am sharing here. My previous exp (way back in 2003 or 2004) with Air Sahara hasn’t been bad, actually I have always enjoyed their Bid n Win program earlier and service use to be good, never had any problem.

Booking done: I booked my ticket through their website on 11-Nov-2006 around 9:00 am and got my ticket generated immediately. My payment process went through smoothly and I got an alert through email and SMS confirming the PNR no. etc. The ticket was booked for 5-Jan-07 from Calcutta to Bangalore (flight no. S2 307). We were traveling with a 4 months old baby.

Beginning of Problem: On 5th Jan when we reached airport at 8:30 am the check-in staff told me that my ticket is canceled and there is no booking in that PNR no. I was asked to approach the sahara airport manager for further assistance. When I reached their office, the airport manager, Goutam Ghosh, was not ready to look into the issue, he curtly said, the ticket is canceled and there is nothing he can do as the flight is full. Then I requested him that to find out how and when the ticket got canceled and why no one informed me about this.
 
Acceptance of the Issue: Then I was directed to some other staff who checked the system and told me that the ticket was "canceled by the system" around 9:30 am, i.e. within half an hour of my booking, though my payment went off immediately through my ICICI bank account, and even if the ticket was canceled no money was not refunded in these 2 months time, neither there was any email or SMS alert informing me about the cancellation. She told me this was probably due to some error in the system and is not due to my fault. Now this guy Gautam Ghosh agreed to look into this matter but he was not ready to confirm, as this was not an issue from their end (means under airport office’s purview) as internet booking is not in their control.

Resolution efforts: Now the wait started and went on till the flight departed, but he could not put us in saying there was no vacancy, though I could see there was quite a few no. of people waitlisted or checked in very late and they were accommodated in the last minute and not us who had a confirmed ticket and tried to checkin in due time. We requested that since we have a small baby he should consider us and not make us wait in the airport for long time, but nothing happened.

Offers: After the flight left he offered me to put into the Jet flight on 2pm the same day, but when their staff went to the Jet counter, tickets were available only for the max price and thus they were not ready to buy. So he finally offered me to put me in a Delhi flight on 3:30 pm and take a connecting flight from Delhi to Bangalore at around 7 pm. I didn’t accept this offer as that meant a whole day wait for us in the airport and also Delhi can be very unpredictable during winter due to fog. So finally I was offered a confirmed ticket on the next day (6th Jan) same flight, so we went back home after waiting in the airport for about 4 hours. And this is due to some fault of the airline and not ours.

Formal Complain: I lodged a complain (No. 6242) in their register and got an acknowledgment from them. But I have not yet heard anything about that complain yet, not sure they even look at these complains at all.

Next day Story: The next day exp was not good either, but we didn’t have any issue with ticket or checkin. But the flight was delayed by about an hour and it started late from Calcutta. But once on the runway and it was ready to take off, one of the passenger fell sick and it had to return to the bay to offload her and her family. Interesting after offloading the flight waited there for some more time to get replacement for these 3-4 passengers and thus got delayed further. Finally it took off from Calcutta around 1pm and reached Bangalore on 4:30 pm, that is 1 day and 2 and half hours delay from my original schedule. The experience in the flight was nothing to mention, the food served wasn’t great and they ran out of non-veg dishes, neither the service, as they ran out of blankets etc.

Overall: Very pathetic experience and nothing good to take from here.

No. of times flown on this Airlines:	Between 4 - 6
Class flown most frequently:	Economy Class