Gate Checked Strollers at DEL
 

If we are connecting from an international flight to a domestic flight at DEL, will our gate-checked stroller be given back to us for the layover, or will it be checked directly through to our final destination? From our experience at Indian airports, they usually don't give you back your gate-checked stroller immediately after you exit the plane (as is the practice in most of East Asia and North America) and you instead have to pick it up at the oversize baggage desk. Similarly, when we recently flew to India on Etihad, they checked our stroller directly through to BOM, and didn't give it back to us in Abu Dhabi.

Like AUH, DEL claims to give transit passengers free strollers to use inside the terminal, but given our experience in AUH (where the strollers were too small, dirty, and many broken or missing), we would expect the same situation at DEL.

Thanks for your feedback and confirmation (one way or the other). It may sound like a small matter, but when you have young children having a proper stroller can make the difference between a nightmare layover and more tolerable experience.

It depends on the carrier flown, the tag on the stroller, and the ground handling crews at the involved airports. I’ve seen lots of flights from the US/Europe/SW Asia to DEL where transiting passengers st DEL got their strollers on arrival in DEL delivered at the gate/tarmac/jetbridge and had them in line at immigration control at DEL.

Its been a while since I checked strollers to India, but in DEL the stroller appeared at luggage claim in international arrivals, as we had to to take to thru customs and recheck it for the domestic flight along with our luggage. That said strollers in India are not really useful, so we switched to a light umbrella stroller for our next trips. DEL is carpeted all over, so pushing a stroller there is rather tedious.

do not expect the stroller at the gate....i face this issue all the time....i always request it to be given to me at the gate & the airline puts the request in but i never get it when i land....its always waiting for me at baggage claim....

The carpeting at DEL is indeed a proverbial drag when it comes to strollers going from plane on arrival to immigration control at least.

Indeed you can’t count on it. Whether you can get it pre-baggage claim varies, even when flying on the same carrier repeatedly with a given stroller. But it’s possible often enough that my travel party members have benefited from having pre-baggage claim Usenet of the personal strollers af DEL.

Thank you all very much for the very useful feedback and information. We haven't yet booked our flights, so will take all this into consideration as we firm up our travel plans.