enjoystravel

I had an opportunity to fly Air Deccan on a recent trip to India. They are a small startup private airlines in India but they are growing aggressively because of their LCC model.

They do not seem to have an FF program. Is this right? Do they have an interline agreement with any of the major airlines?

They seem to be serving some interesting tourist and visitor routes in South India with plans to expand to other regions in India.

B747-437B

They seem to charge even for water on board, so I highly doubt they are giving out FF miles.

The jury is still out as to whether they will make it or not. They have only been around for a few months, and their financial resources are questionable by all accounts.

enjoystravel

I can see that the jury is still out on whether this is a serious carrier.

It was interesting flying them for the first time as a lot of friends and colleagues warned me about their first flt. They were expecting some VIPs to kickoff their flt in HYD and it caught fire. It seems to have been a moisture problem - I do not know enough to know if it could have been avoided by better maintenance or improved training.

I also understand that it was started by a company that had experience in chartered helicopter flts. They too had some safety problems - an important leader died in a helicopter crash I understand.

Despite the above fears, I did fly on this carrier and I am very interested in seeing that they are serving a lot of smaller airports that do not have scheduled commercial service. I know a lot of visitors who are interested in flying to those towns. Given the safety on roads in India, even Air Deccan may be safer than road travel.

The reason I am curious about FF program is that I noticed that they are aggressively trying to grow their operations and are negotiating with Boeing and Airbus to buy new aircraft for longer domestic routes. If that happens, they will probably have to introduce some type of FF program (the US LCCs use programs different from Legacy Carriers and do have good loyalty as well). Maybe some program that offers 1 free RT for every 14 boarding passes or some such (WN used to have such a painful RR program in the beginning).

They seem to be the first airline in recent years to be again approved for foreign equity investment (news item this week). I suspect that unless they have a mishap they will probably be around.

IAN-UK

I'd like to resurrect this Air Deccan thread - for the very selfish reason that I'm considering flying them BOM HYD BOM GOI BOM in November. It will save pots of money because they treat all passengers the same in terms of ticket prices - i.e. none of the expensive USD fares non-residents are forced to pay on JET and the others.

But long delays or cancellations could seriously mess things up. Has anyone travelled with them recently - can they be trusted ^ ??

Cheers, Ian

GUWonder

I've been with them for DEL-BOM and BOM-GOI a few times recently. No problem but they seem to like getting a few dollars (couple hundred rupees actually) for going over the weight limit far more than any other carrier I've been on in India.

Their check-in and boarding process is slower and more cumbersome than what I've experienced with the big 3/4 in India (witnessed with longer, slower moving lines often); and the staff in-flight is not as warm/friendly but still decent; the flights/seats seem more cramped; and they charge for everything, including beverages and food. The planes/seats seem clean and rather new (at least by American standards) and, although they seem to run a bit late, it's been fine enough and a truly good value.

All that said, I still prefer Jet Airways.

(Yes, Air Deccan can generally be trusted to get you from A to B without much of an issue if you give yourself enough time on either end to compensate for "normal" Indian flight issues.

Savage25

Speaking of BOM-GOI, anyone done it on Spicejet (http://www.spicejet.com) or Kingfisher (http://www.flykingfisher.biz)? I have an aversion to flying Air Deccan's ATRs

knit-in

Although I have never flown the said airline, I have heard that they need to do some serious attitude adjustment as also straighten out departure facilities, atleast in DEL. A friend, departing from Delhi missed his flight when he wasn't allowed into the departure gate from what seems is a common departure area. Announcements were scarce so by the time he managed to find his way to the gate, he was told his flight had left. I can understand the whole mess as a big misunderstanding/ lack of communication issue, but what got me boiling listening to the story was this Gate Agent's attitude who told my friend it seemed that this was the first time he was flying! This guy has status on BA and UA and flies on work all the time from NYC.

aeroguy

Not quite BOM-GOI, but I did fly Spicejet BOM-AMD-DEL on a Sunday morning flight back in September. The flight itself was comfortable enough (single class 737-800 with 180+ seats, but was okay for an average-size person), and they did give you some water and a cookie on the flights. The check-in process was a bit slow, but definitely on the manageable side by Indian standards. Baggage return was reasonable in Delhi. The only problem was that we were delayed a bit on the AMD-DEL leg with a mechanical issue.

The only surprise was that they still hand-wrote the boarding pass. I didn't think to ask whether it was a standard practice for them.