SeeBuyFly

If I am going to an Indian city not currently being served by international flights, am I forced to quarantine in DEL or BOM i.e. at the point where I enter India?

Redhat72

Reading on twitter that many of Air India's flights to US are getting cancelled or rescheduled? Any specific reason for that? Almost the frequency of cancellation is every other day & lot of reschedules. Sure to cause inconvenience to folks who have connections.

PiperAtGatesofDawn

Haven’t heard of the Vande Bharat flights being cancelled. Can you point to specific flights that were cancelled?

PiperAtGatesofDawn

It will be in the final destination not at BOM or DEL. Keep in mind different states have different quarantine rules. And these rules keep changing/evolving depending on how the state is doing.

You can find some of the rules here but I’m not sure how often this is updated - https://www.goindigo.in/information/...gulations.html

oliver2002

A colleague just came back to Europe from BOM with LH. The process is rather simple: you call the consulate and ask if you can enter Germany (he has a D visa) they confirm it is OK for Indians with that visa type to enter/transit Germany and give you a reference for Lufthansa to use. LH will WL the reservation and confirm it a few days later. The flight was full of POIs going 'home' to US/Canada/Europe. On arrival the immigration officer in Germany asked him if he was aware of the quarantine obligation and that he had to report to the county health office. He reported to them once he was home and they called twice a week. They offered to lift the obligation if he took a covid test at the next testing center.

If you arrive in BOM/DEL, the rules of MH/NCT apply so you go into testing/isolation/etc. When you travel onward to your final destination the rules of the state you arrive at apply, so if e.g. WB doesn't like arrival from MH, you have to go thru the the whole rigmarole in CCU again. Which is ridicoulous because if you have a pertinent reason (parents dying/dead, parent of <10yr old, pregnant etc) the entire quarantine is waived.

PiperAtGatesofDawn

You have to do this only once... “Passengers arriving on an international Vande Bharat Mission flight may only take a connecting domestic flight if it also comes under the Vande Bharat Mission. However, passengers who are planning to board onward domestic flights will have to obtain an authorised exemption certificate, if they are coming through non-Vande Bharat international flights,” the guideline issued by the authority further said.

The problem with CCU was different where they blanket banned all flights from some cities like DEL, BOM etc. That could be skirted by doing DEL-XXX-CCU instead of DEL-CCU. Rendering that harebrained idea as useless as the random 2 day lockdowns they are doing right now.

ft4lyf

Didn't you know that the virus takes vacation the other days of the week?? it also gets tired!

Redhat72

So far, flights to EWR from BOM were cancelled on July 22, 24 & I believe there were few cancellations between July 15 - 20 as well.
There have been few cancellations of DEL-ORD and DEL-SFO sectors too - July 22

Although the AI website only shows up status till July 25, few customers are getting cancellation emails for future flights in August. Wonder if the recent furlough of pilots and staff has anything to do with this. I can see that there is huge demand for travel but AI may have limited resources (staff and fleet). Just my assumption. They may be other factors too e.g. the air bubbles, limit on how many flights can be operated etc.

PiperAtGatesofDawn

I'm just seeing 1 flight cancelled on 22 Jul (BOM-EWR) and 23 Jul for others. I don't know if there's anything more than AI's operational inefficiencies or regulatory issues in play (all my conjecture). The DEL-SFO route seems to be in trouble though.

And I doubt there's great demand right now. Apart from the initial surge of people who needed to get back home (both from India & USA), I'm not sure how many people are doing business & tourism travel between the two countries right now. Students are not allowed to travel (at least on the Vande Bharat flights) and of course it's unlikely they are taking regular flights there. Still AI just announced some 200 new flights through August!


BOM - EWR

DEL - JFK

DEL - ORD

DEL - SFO

Redhat72

Few video logs by travelers who flew Air India Vande Bharat flights to North America. Helps in understanding the process.

https://youtu.be/T4AK7cfLZdA

https://youtu.be/Jko8qMsORiU

It also seems that there is no entertainment on these flights even to US or Canada.

Redhat72

Thanks for the schedules @PiperAtGatesofDawn. Where did you get the time table from? If I look at Air India website, I see that today's flight to EWR (24 July) is also cancelled. It seems that Jul 21 flight was cancelled where flyers were told after they reached the airport. It was then rescheduled for next day. But since there was already a scheduled flight, wonder if two flights took off or just one? Or are they consolidating two flights if they are not getting filled up?

Redhat72

Air India has updated their schedule. That answers some of the cancellation decisions. Updated schedule can be found at

EVACUATION-FLIGHT

PiperAtGatesofDawn

I got this from flightaware.com.

TVs being a avoidable high touch surface has been switched off on many airlines. AI has also announced this prior to the flights. Of course on AI you have about 2 hours of watchable content anyways. So you're really not missing out on anything.

oliver2002

Well, the screens can/should be cleaned after each flight, so this is not an issue. Most airlines have also found cleaning agents that are not so agressive to the screen. Methinks that AI would like to avoid paying the distribution fees to the content provider and just switched off the system as a result.

galaticos

INR 8k per nite - yes getting Marriott nights and reward points. on the inbound - have to register online which gives you a unique ID of inbound passenger.. TA did the rest of registering that inbound ID with DEL airport and allocating to marriott..