Virgin Atlantic and bad customer service

I am never going to fly Virgin Atlantic (called VA from now) ever again because of its utmost crappy customer service from top to bottom.

Till now I always thought that VA was in a better league than other airlines. My experience on Wednesday Feb 21st changed my opinion. Va flight 351 from Mumbai to London was canceled due to Technical Problems. Something went majorly wrong and they canceled it.

Fair enough, things go wrong, shit happens. But this is the time when airlines need to show their strength at customer service. And this is where they exactly failed, big time. 250 passengers were boarded on the flight. When the flight didn't take off within the first 1/2 hour people began asking questions. The captain announces that there is some problem and he will get back within 10 minutes with the answer.

His 10 minutes usually actually meant 1/2 an hour! He seriously had no sense of time. It wasn't until 3 hours that he finally heard from engineering that the plane had a serious snag and won't take off today.

Now starts the fun. People had come from far away areas like Pune, Ahemadabad and Nasik for this flight as these cities do not have a international airport. They were naturally curious as to what alternative arrangement will the airline do till the time a next flight is arranged.

The airline officials audaciously declared that the passengers either need to figure out their way to their relatives in Mumbai itself, or the ones who didn't have anybody in Mumbai need to figure out hotels in the city and the airline will reimburse the charges. Given this imagine that most of the passengers traveling to London were British tourists to India and had no idea of Mumbai city let alone starting to search hotels for themselves !

Among the passengers was a old lady who couldn't walk and needed a wheelchair. VA couldn't arrange for a wheelchair for more than 2 hours ! Poor lady had to sit on the airport floor for around 2 hours before a wheel chair was arranged.

During offloading of luggage several passengers had their luggage damaged as well. VA refused to acknowledge that.

After much complaining and pushing by almost all passengers VA officials finally agreed to hire a hotel consultant to assist passengers to find a hotel. They promised Rs 10,000 to each passenger for hotel & travel and other expenses per head. Unfortunately the consultant they hired found out that there were no rooms available for the 250 people in entire of Mumbai !! When, after a long search he did find some room the room costs were 17000 Rs a night. This meant that passengers needed to shell out 7000 Rs themselves or share the room with other passengers!

Imagine a city of more than 5 crore people having no rooms for even a single person! This move was seen as the biggest put off by passengers. Everybody was complaining about VA trying to sacrifice passenger comfort in an attempt to save money. At one point people were furious about all the mess up and were out fighting with VA staff.

Passengers who were traveling to the US through a connection from London were then later offered a alternative Delta flight which was leaving at 1-10 am that day. Those who wanted to report to work the next day (like me) were happy to get on board that flight. Others chose to stay in the hotel and get on the next VA flight the next day.

Overall after this horrible mismanagement at VA in times when their customer service is really at test I will try avoiding the airlines completely. No more foreign airlines from now. I am going to stick to pretty good Air India and Jet airways from now. They at least arrange for wheelchairs immediately!