The 3.pm bus from Coventry got us to Heathrow just after 5pm on Monday. That left us 4 hours to eat a Pret A Manger sandwich and cover ourselves with free perfume. The plane was half an hour late but trouble free. The food was a solid 5 out of 10. Well my omelette was particularly solid! Go Air India!
At this point it is worth mentioning that it is now possible to fly to India without having to deal with anyone from pesky UK immigration. Sure everyone wants to see your passport, but interestingly no one in a uniform and no one with a rubber stamp.
We landed more or less on time and ready for the fun to start. First we walked past a group of uniformed people who looked like they were working on a pop up biometric data gathering stand. Should we join the very small queue for this? Nobody knew. Least of all the pop up people. We cruised on to the immigration queue. There were 6 individual queues for this each with 4 office booths. Which one to choose? We chose the first queue. Bad choice! After we had waited 20 minutes a flotilla of wheelchairists were rolled in straight to the front of the first booth. Still, 3 booths left. But no. The guy at booth 2 just upped and left. He’d had enough and there was no replacement. Then all the IT in booth 3 failed. And the guy in booth 4 went to help the guy in booth 3 fix his IT. For a while booth 3 and 4 looked empty but there were people on their hands and knees unplugging and re plugging stuff on the floor. When we asked what we were supposed to do there was a deafening silence and definitely no eye contact (especially from the 2 on the floor). We eventually got through knowing our bags would be ready for us on carousel 14. However, this was not the case. In the new improved system at baggage control-Delhi they employ a group of 10 people to take bags off the carousel and indiscriminately and pile them on the floor around the conveyor. This leads to mayhem. No one knows where to look for anything and you can’t move for bags. Our last bag was found approximately 2 hours after landing. And we had a driver waiting just outside the baggage hall. For 90 minutes! Still Delhi has been named the best airport in India 7 years in a row so it must be all relative!