My Air India Booking Story

I have been looking to book tickets to travel to the US and was checking multiple sites for a good schedule and price. Expedia, MakeMyTrip, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Singapore Airlines are some of the sites I tried (sans Air India). Like most travellers usually do, have been checking prices a few days for a good deal.

I happened to read this news story from NDTV / NDTV Profit. This prompted me to check Air India. I also realized that over the last week or so, though I have been looking at numerous travel portals , I never logged into the Air India site even once to check the schedule or price.

With the hopes of getting a great deal, I logged in to the Air India Website, keyed in the origin and destination and was certainly not surprised to see the System Busy Screen. This was the same even after a few minutes. I was frustrated with the poor quality.

Jan 12, 2015 – 10:25 AM PST / 23:55PM IST

There are great marketing / business lessons to learn from this on what not to do:

You have a passenger looking for air travel tickets, there is a news article on discount fares and you have the passenger visiting your website based on the news article (marketing at work). The system works efficiently as designed (execution). The customer travels through Air-India, gets a pleasant experience (quality) and there is a good probability for the passenger to fly again (repeat customer). 

However, clearly this is not the case here. Poor quality of service & execution (website) is exhibited, even before booking tickets and trying our airline. AirIndia should ensure that their product or service can handle the load before advertising or distributing the news content to aid sales. This will lead to building the reputation of the brand.