More December Adventures

The week after our short excursion to El Paso, we left for India for the remainder of the winter break. It was not, as readers of this blog will know, Shreya's first flight, but it was her first-ever international expedition.

The process of booking and taking the flight itself was a bit of an adventure. Here in the US, taking one's infant (under 2 yrs) on a domestic flight is very easy. On some airlines one can just show up at  the airport with the kid and some identification while others like to have prior notification, but either way it is free and pretty painless.

One big difference on international flights is that the infant does not travel free, but instead needs a ticket which costs something like 15% of the regular fare. So of course one has to start planning it when one is buying the tickets.

Needless to say, we had never bought an international infant ticket before. Still, we took it in our stride when the Vayama agent contradicted what the website said (that if traveling with an infant, tickets should not be purchased online) and insisted that we first buy our tickets and then call to add the infant, who incidentally would need a paper ticket. Nor were we unduly alarmed when two weeks later no paper ticket arrived, and a phone call revealed that they had issued her an electronic ticket after all. Two days before the trip when we called the airline to be assigned seats, we were told that the infant ticket had been cancelled! However, this turned out to be incompetence on the airline agent's part and after much time on the phone, it was sorted out.

Then came the day of the trip itself. We went to the airport early, three hours before the flight, to check in. That was when the adventure started. The woman at the counter found our reservation,  as well as the evidence that we had paid for Shreya's ticket. She looked at our passports, to make sure we had the right permissions. She took our suitcase. And then she tried to print us boarding passes and failed. The system would not allow her to "attach Shreya" to one of us and print the boarding passes. She tried some other things. She called system support, who were apparently unhelpful -- we only heard her side of the conversation, but there were heated words and accusations of unprofessionalism were bandied about. She tried some more. She called her supervisor for help. Then they called her supervisor for help. More than an hour slipped by. Finally someone was found who knew the right incantation (or had the power to overrule the system) and we were issued boarding passes, and we were given a paper ticket for Shreya, so that the same fiasco could be avoided on subsequent legs of the journey. We made it through the security checkpoint and to our gate just as they announced the boarding.

While we had been waiting at the check-in, some kindly soul gave Shreya a balloon. She was very pleased with it and took it on the flight with her. It was no problem on the domestic hop to Dallas. But on the Dallas-Frankfurt flight the balloon was confiscated by an air hostess who told us that it would pop during take-off with a loud bang and would unduly alarm the other passengers!

And then, Frankfurt. Our onward flight from Frankfurt to Bombay was to come from Chicago, disgorge a lot of passengers who were going to Delhi and pick up the Bombay passengers. Unfortunately, bad weather in the midwest prevented it from coming. So Air India decided to put us all on the Delhi flight, which had a lot of empty seats, because... Of course they did not tell us this right away, and their information counter at the airport is beyond the immigration point, Shreya and I did a lot of milling around while Tom went "out into Germany" to find out what was going on. However it was all eventually sorted out and we were bundled on  to the Delhi flight. As we were doing so, the airline agent who was collecting boarding passes took away Shreya's paper ticket. I tried to argue, but she said that they needed to collect that, and there would be no problem.

Hours later, we were in Delhi along with 40 or so other people who also wanted to be in Bombay instead. We went through immigration, picked up our stuff, went through customs, back into the airport to take the Bombay flight. And then of course we had no ticket to prove that Shreya was booked all the way to Bombay (since unlike us, she had had a paper ticket rather than an electronic one, and it had been taken away in Germany).  After much arguing and nail-biting, during which they kept saying, "Don't worry, we will get you to Bombay, BUT..." they finally accepted the stub of Shreya's previous boarding pass (which we might so easily have thrown away, but somehow we had not) in lieu of the ticket and let us on. And then, a few hours later, we were home.

Throughout the journey, Shreya was angelic. She napped, she cooed, she smiled at the other passengers. Several people remarked about what a good baby she was. That, at least, was a mercy.

One nice thing about Delhi airport is that though they kept us there five or six hours, they thoughtfully provided us with a playground for Shreya.