OK
There are still a lot of IC/AI baiters here some of whom appear to have not flown on the airline in recent times and speak as experts based on the horror stories what their grandfathers have passed on from the Dakota days.
Conceeded there are few odd cases even now, not denying that! But as some one who tries to take an objective view of things and having flown fairly frequently in all the major domestic airlines over the last decade, I can confidently say that IC has improved by leaps and bounds.
1 Their safey record is comparable to many others of its size, esp keeping in mind that they still have to fly some pretty antiquated equipemt to some even more antiquated airfields which Jet and Sahara wont touch. After the Alliance Air 737 went down in PAT, there were no fatal crashes.
Yes there has been blemishes, including the A300 wandering off to check its strenth against the boundary wall at DEL, but then so has Jet with incidents like the taxiway landing at GOI and quite a fw more, as does Sahara and even Deccan.
ICs customer support is good, comparable to any prviate airline. I was informed of a rescheduling of an early morning HYD MAA flight about 12 hours ahead (as soon as the flight was rescheduled), while Jet waited patiently for me to dawdle about 45 min a slow moving check in line before telling me about a three hour delay which I understood later, they were aware of , many hours ahead(this was the day after someone went decided to cart off the Localiser at BOM to the scrap yard
for some quick bucks). Yes, ofcourse " sir your travel agent may have forgotten to pass on your contact number etc etc " but having been one myself earlier, there are few things which I do everytime I travel and that is to ensure my contact number is there.
ICs website is as friendly if not better than Jet as regards to practical information, what the passengers want to know! They were also one of the first to introduce online booking and eticketing, not to speak of agressive pricing. Of course with the mentality and antiquated images people carry about IC, half the time people dont even bother to check low fares on IC.
Yet another thing which many of the passengers dont even know. IC is one of the few airlines offering 30KG baggage allowance in economy for their domestic flights, a whole 10 kg more than Jet or Sahara. Very useful for people who have a lot of luggage, esp if two are travelling together.
Despatch reliabilty of IC esp for the A320s is agood as any other operator. On time performance is also comparable with the private carriers.
A few points Just to keep the debate going on....
Cheers