Air Deccan - Always Delayed. Review on Simplifly Deccan

Well if you are planning to travel on Air Deccan, be prepared to be delayed. The delay could happen in any form - either the flight gets delayed (owing to reasons which Air Deccan would not bother to inform passengers or lame excuses which are smsed to passengers before travel)

Or it might just happen that passengers reach the destination on time and then are stranded at the conveyor for luggage to arrive. I personally have had the horrendous experience, at the Delhi airport, of waiting for over an hour just for my luggage to arrive.

Another form of delay which can be experienced is after you land, you might realize that the bus which carries passengers from the aircraft to the terminal takes a good 15-20 minutes to arrive. What Air Deccan does is that they employ just one bus to carry passengers from the Aircraft to the terminal, as a result passengers coming down later could be stranded next to the aircraft for the time the first trip of the bus gets completed. This is the general practice, there could be exceptions on Delhi/ Mumbai airports where they might have more than one bus.

Another experience of delay could be after the aircraft lands, there might be a delay in the getting down from the aircraft esp for passengers seated in the rear of the aircraft. Air Deccan usually opens only the front exit of the airbus aircraft for exiting the passengers. There could be many benefits to the airline by employing such a strategy. One is that they would need to employ just one stair case per aircraft. Also as I mentioned above, they could use just one bus to carry passengers instead of a must two if they deploy both the exits.

What really adds fuel to fire, Air Deccan staff does not feel responsible for any delays which passengers might have to encounter owing to their lack of service (or poor quality of service) or arrival / departure. The least the airline could do is communicate the same to the passengers and ensure that the customer service manager is there for assurance, even if there is a genuine problem at the airlines end.

Unfortunately, I happened to buy the Superflier plus set of 16 tickets through Air Deccan's site and have already utilized 12 fo the 16 coupons. While I certainly agree that it is value for money, but what Air Deccan does not realize is that even if it's a no frill, low cost airline that doesn't mean they can do away with poor quality of service. But that’s exactly what Air Deccan delivers to its passengers - Poor quality of service on all fronts. I have travel extensively and have experienced a vast spectrum of services from various airlines. However, my each flight with Air Deccan is the same story repeated.

Air Deccan allows 15kgs per passenger as permissible limit for check in baggage. However for other airlines its mostly 15kgs (Kingfisher gives 25kgs) plus 5 kgs grace. However Air Deccan doesn’t give any grace kgs. Based on the whims and fancies on the executive at the counter, be prepared to shell out Rs. 40 per KG of extra check in baggage in case you have an excess baggage.

Hand baggage limit is 5KGS.

Recent addition of inflight entertainment was quite a pleasant surprise.

So keep your fingers crossed and your day free, the day you are scheduled to travel on Air Delayed oops Air Deccan