Jet Airways are really good at customer service. So good in fact, that they want you to come to their office and sample their customer service first hand, where as other ‘stupid’ airlines believe in getting the work done over the phone!
This was when we had to postpone the return leg of our journey (as we had one change free). So we called them up and got the booking changed (which was rather efficient, I must admit!).
Then came the surprise. They asked us to come to their city office (in Rajiv Chowk, New Delhi) or the one at the International Airport (a good 1 hrs. drive one way) to physically get the e-ticket changed.
Not only that they also asked us to bring the old e-ticket and a copy of the passports (for identification purposes, as if our identities had changed somehow!). I asked the person that why can’t you e-mail us a copy of the new e-ticket (duh! E-mail - E-ticket!) but he said sorry that cannot be done.
So thus began the great pilgrimage to the Jet Airways office.
As we had LOADS of time for random forced journeys (I mean we ARE on our holiday!), we chose the city office thinking it would be easier to get it done there.
So there we presented ourselves at 4pm (by the way office closes SHARP at 5.30pm) only to find the small office (for a BIG airline the front office was the size of a small cozy coffee-shop) full of people. At the desk were two partially trained office staff handling a queue of about twenty-five people.
Let me digress and describe their business process (or the lack thereof).
So the agent sitting on the front desk will physically get-up to give certain documents to the cashier (and a normal transaction would require couple of such trips). Then there would be a small conference at the credit card machine where they would discuss the best way of processing a particular credit card (while people were standing – including me and thinking DAMN this is slower than a government office!).
Then out of the back office there appeared two more agents and the processing got a little quicker (thank god at least they had a token system for the waiting people!). After about 40 minutes of standing around our turn finally came.
Moving to the desk I discovered to my horror that out of the three female staff members two had French manicured nails and were typing with just two fingers! Only one staff member had her nails down to normal length and using both hands to touch type.
So imagine the frustration of watching the lady input the passport details for both me and my wife using just two fingers.
The typing took so long that I almost got hypnotized watching those two manicured fingers click-clacking on the keyboard.
Then she looked up, smiled and said ‘You can collect the tickets from the cashier’. I went to the cashier expecting old fashioned tickets (you know the ones with that red carbon coating and all those magical codes).
But the cashier just handed me two printouts of the new e-tickets. That is what you call ‘irony’.
