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Travelling from the US to India can get very expensive, and, at times, it can get rather tempting to fly Middle Eastern airlines to save a few hundred dollars. BIG MISTAKE!! I once made the foolish decision
to fly Kuwait Airways from Chicago to New Delhi instead of flying with a European airline as is my general practice. One of the first problems I had with Kuwait is that they only have two flights per week from Chicago to Kuwait. This makes scheduling flights very inconvenient, since you can not always fly on the dates you want. I wanted a weekend flight, but was unable to get it because Kuwait only had Monday and Thursday flights. I still went ahead and bought the tickets, as they were about $200 less than other airlines. When I went to the airport to checkin for the flight, there were only 2 counters open to checkin about 300 economy class passengers. After a 1.5 hour wait in line, I finally got to checkin. When I loaded my suitcases on to the counter, it turned out that one piece of luggage was about a pound overweight. The ground staff demanded that I pay $175 in overweight luggage fines before they allowed my luggage on to the plane. I said that I would simply remove something from my suitcase and put it in my carryon bag. However, when I started to do so, they took all my luggage (along with the rest of my family’s luggage) and handed it back to us, and then told us to go to the end of the line and checkin again. Thankfully, this time, we were able to checkin successfully. Because of random delays, we ended up leaving Chicago 2 hours late. Upon boarding the plane, we were met by some of the most unhelpful and rude flight attendants I have ever seen. I can honestly say that even Air India and Indian Airlines have trained their flight attendants to treat passengers better than Kuwait has. These Kuwait Airways flight attendants practically threw themselves at the feet of the handful of white passengers onboard, while practically ignoring all the Indian/Pakistani passengers, who made up about 80% of the people in economy. It took them almost an hour to bring me some aspirin and water once I started to get a headache. The planes were newish A340’s, no complaints there, and the seats did have personal TV monitors with a reasonable selection of movies and games, to I will admit that we were well entertained. The seats were not particularly comfortable, they were average economy class seats. The meals themselves were not that good either. They were basically standard airline food, though I have had much better meals on Swissair and Air France. After a brief stop in Amsterdam, we arrived in Kuwait about 1 hour late, which gave us just enough time to frantically run through the terminal to the gate for the Kuwait-New Delhi flight. This flight was several notches below the Chicago-Kuwait flight as far as quality is concerned. The plane was much older, and showed a lot more wear. Bathrooms were absolutely disgusting. Meals were still unimpressive, and the flight attendants were actually worse (If that is even possible). We managed to arrive in Delhi in one piece, but three pieces of our luggage didnt. Apparently they had been left behind in Kuwait for one reason or another, and would not be joining us for a couple of days. Even though we were flying out of Delhi in a few hours, we still had some relatives in Delhi who managed to check with the airline every day till our luggage arrived 3 days later. Once this disaster of a trip came to an end, we swore never to fly a non-European airline to India ever again.
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Pros: |
Newer planes, Personal TV's
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Cons: |
Everything else
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No. of times flown on this Airlines:
Between 1 - 3
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Class flown most frequently:
Economy Class
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