Simplyfly...though few hours late. Review on Simplifly Deccan

I am a brand ambassador for Air Deccan.

I have made it a point to try and dissuade as many people I know to never fly Air Deccan even in their dreams. Because even in their dreams, the flights will be delayed and by the time the flight is ready to take off, they will need to wake up.

Last month, I had planned for a Diwali vacation to south and made elaborate planning well in advance. Having heard a lot about Air Deccan and the cheap tickets they offer, I booked tickets from Mumbai to Bangalore for the start of my journey. That was a big mistake as I realized later.

On the day, We reached the airport well in time to take the 11.30 flight to Bangalore (I had booked for connecting train to Kodai in the night and was planning to spend few hours in Bangalore). After checking in we were waiting to go in for Security clearance, when At 11.15(15 minutes prior to departure), Air Deccan proudly announces that the flight to Bangalore has been re-scheduled at 16.45!!!!. Technical snag. Didn’t they know about this earlier?? But lets give the credit where it is due, I did receive an intimation by SMS, at 1230…(so what if it was late, at least I received it before the flight took off).

A lot of irate passengers like me tried to confront the Air Deccan staff at the airport demanding alternative arrangements to be made( Yeah, we were fools to expect this). To every question we posed, they had one single answer, “We are a low cost airline”. “You can have the FULL refund”

Since my connecting train was only in the night, we decided to wait after assurances from their staff that the flight will definitely take off at 1645. But to our horror, after an hour, the display changes again!!! Now the flight has been re-scheduled further to 1745. What’s more, their other flight to Bangalore at 1400 hours was rescheduled to 2130 !!!

Now, that was the proverbial last straw….I promptly went over to the Jet Airways counter to check about availability of tickets to Bangalore and guess what, they had tickets available though at 15% higher cost. No marks for guessing which flight we (and almost 50% of other Air Deccan passengers) took.

Which brings me to the basic point that If Jet Airways offers spot booking of tickets which are only 10-15% higher than tickets booked thru Air Deccan more than a month back, IS AIR DECCAN really a low cost airline?? Low quality, yes, Low cost NO.

While I do understand that these things do happen to other airlines as well, it is the poor handling of situation which leaves a bad taste in ones mouth. To my repeated questions to the staff of Air Deccan on what is the one thing they are doing to retain the confidence of 180 passengers in Air Deccan, they had no reply…They were simply not bothered..

In a recent issue of Business World, I had read about Air Deccan being one of the companies to watch out for in 2006. May be that is true. Because if this is the way the airline operates, they are not going to be around in 2007….