I recently flew Air India to Amsterdam with my wife and our 11-month-old baby. When booking the tickets we saw the bassinet seats were already taken, so customer service booked us extra legroom seats instead and we paid for them in advance.
Online check-in went smoothly and we received our boarding passes in Kochi. But when we reached Delhi to board the Amsterdam flight, things started going wrong. The staff couldn’t scan our boarding passes and kept getting errors. They even checked my visa and work permit again even though I had already cleared immigration. At the final check before boarding, the pass still wouldn’t scan.
After we got onto the aircraft, a ground staff member told me that if I didn’t change seats, my family would be offloaded from the flight. There was no apology and no real explanation. We were basically told to move seats or get off the plane.
My wife and I ended up switching seats and even sitting on the floor at times so we could manage the baby during the flight. Apparently the issue was that another passenger with a baby was seated in the same row, which the customer care agent shouldn’t have booked in the first place.
Boarding also finished around 1:40 PM even though the flight was scheduled to leave at 1:10 PM. Then they realized three passengers from the incoming flight hadn’t arrived yet, so everyone had to wait until they showed up. The plane finally departed around 3 PM.
On top of all that, there were the usual Air India problems like the inflight entertainment not working, cockroaches in the cabin, and even water dripping inside.
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