64/ 100 Spice Max

We learned several important lessons about making internal flights around India the day we flew from Varanasi Shastri airport to Udaipur in the far away lands of Rajasthan. The first one, mentioned in the last story, was to pretty much just ignore whatever people tell you to do because, if you don’t, you will be the only person who is abiding by the rules and you won’t get anywhere. The second thing we discovered was that the national airline, Air India, seems to get priority over every other airline when it comes to departure times.

Being a little bit stingy I had booked our flights with one of the many budget airlines available, Spice Jet. Not only was the route cheaper than Air India, but because it was so cheap we could afford to splash out on Spice Max seats which were the best class on the aircraft (but I wouldn’t use the term ‘first class’ or even ‘business class’). More about that later. Even with our Spice Max upgrade we were still quids-in compared to the Air India flights. It was a no-brainer, or so I thought. Sadly Spice Jet, at least on that particular day, did not seem particularly good at one vital part of air travel; getting passengers into the air.

The queue for our desk was long and stationary. In fact, as well as our flight, the little hand-written board above the cheery Spice Jet staff showed that there were some others whose departure times were already several hours in the past. All the flights were funnelling to just one of the numerous desks and tempers were running high. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the 20 or so gates to our right were all Air India and their passengers were moving through the system at a fair rate of knots. Why could they do it and not us?

We were told to use the very fancy touch display screens in the foyer to find out how many hours late our flight would be, but only one worked and it simply said ‘delayed’. A fight broke out when Air India called over the tannoy to say they were boarding a flight to one of our destinations, and to rub salt into our budget-inflicted wounds, theirs was actually early.

The queue for our single desk was now so long that it actually went all the way back through the security scanner and out of the main door. There was so much tension in the air that the staff relented and opened a second desk and, to our joy, indicated that it was for Spice Max customers, just like us! We we finally getting somewhere, weren’t we?