Feb 27, 2010 04:15 AM
4176 Views
(Updated Feb 28, 2010 01:43 PM)
My last trip included segments with 4 different airlines: United, Lufthansa, Emirates, Air India.
Summary: Emirates easily the best. Air India easily the worst and United/Lufthansa somewhere in between. I have put my experiences in all 4 airlines below (Emirates, then Lufthansa, then United and then Air India)
Details:Emirates was clearly the best of all... the food choices were real good and the taste was great. This was a flight from Dubai to Hyderabad and I was very surprised to hear announcements in Telugu (local language in Hyderabad) and also printed instructions in Telugu on board the flight (even meals menu had telugu descriptions). They serve free alcohol and would not mind serving 2 or 3 servings of alcohol even on a 3 hour flight. They have a nice sticker for each seat that lets the passenger whether he should not be disturbed for meals/should be woken for meals.This was my second experience with Emirates, the other one was about 5 years ago and I remember that experience to be as good as this one. Overall, my favorite airlines (likely alongside Malaysian: haven't tried Jet Airways: heard good things about that airline as well).
Lufthansa service was good. The food was okay, nothing to brag about there.
United airlines was close to bad... the biggest downside with United airlines is the seating: they have economy and economyPlus even on international flights --> economy seating definitely feels congested (can't open my laptop in this seating, unlike every other flight in this segment). They do this just to differentiate economy & economyPlus seating. And United airlines only one free check-in baggage on international flights. Note that the first airline of your journey decides how many free bags are allowed (United was first flight out of US --> allows only one bag, and Air India was first flight out of India --> allows 2 free check-in bags). The food was okay. The entertainment system wasn't good... the way it works is that they start all movies on all channels at the same time. There's no pause/play on these systems. If your movie is done early, you have to wait for other movies to be done and catch the next movie that you are interested at the right instant.
Air India: As is the case with many other reviews that I have read on this and other forums, Air India experience was the worst. It started right at the issuance of boarding passes. I waited in front of the counter for my boarding passes for more than 30 minutes... this was purely because the systemswere down. It wasn't one system, it was the entire line, so no agent was able to issue boarding passes to any Air India customers. I was told by the agent that this happens every now and then. I was able to see that other airline carriers (Jet, etc) were able to issue their customers boarding passes. Obviously for this reason, the first flight from HYD to BOM was delayed by an hour or so. There were no announcements that the flight is delayed or anything like that. This is the same flight that will fly from BOM to Frankfurt, but with a stop-over of 4:30 hours in Bombay. In Bombay, about 15 minutes before the scheduled departure, we get an announcement that the flight is delayed by 1 hour. Some of the passengers were frustrated as this was the delay from 2am to 3am and the announcement could have been made much earlier as well. Just to appease the passengers, they said that the flight would cover that loss of 1 hour during the journey (sounded funny to me), which however did not happen. Then the food was quite ordinary, or bad in one case. ]
As a breakfast, they served a cold sandwich, which was 2 bread loaves sandwiched with a cheese slice and 2 cucumber pieces (not to mention quite tasteless). One other thing that I hated was that I was waked on 2 occasions to serve me meals... I was like I really don't care for meals as it's hard to catch sleep on these seats. I can't understand why all airlines can't follow the way Emirates (and likely other good airlines) do w.r.t. giving a sticker with choices (as mentioned above). The entertainment system did not have many choices.I knew that flying Air India was not going to be a good experience, but I figured that I could bare those 2 flights for the $200+ savings in my flight fare.
