Vying Flying

I couldn't resist, I had to dedicate a post for something I got in the email that my cousin S sent me a few days ago.

A little history: India has several budding flight operators for domestic travel and they are quite aggressive about capturing the loyalty of their customers.

I have flown Go Air and found my experience quite pleasant. The staff were very courteous, well-mannered, well-dressed, and some of the male flight attendants were even pretty darned good looking ;-)

I can't say much for Indian Airlines or Jet Airways. In my personal experience, the staff seemed pretty angry and unhappy, didn't seem to want to help much, and the aircrafts themselves were rickety and untidy.

Now, while the airlines have sprouted like weed, the airports have not expanded suitably to handle the traffic, so, there was a mad rush around boarding time, impossibly unclear announcements, and frequent delays.

Disclaimer: This is entirely just my experience so far, and am sure I will get to do a post next year when I visit again and find things vastly improved and wonderfully jolly.

Anyway, being tight on time as both D and I get only a total of 15 business days off as vacation, provided we don't squander it on sickness or other emergencies, when we visit India, it has become extremely convenient to fly to most places we needed to go. While I am nostalgic and partial to trains, we simply couldn't afford the time.

Packing Jaipur, Agra, Delhi, Goa, Vizag, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and Chennai in a 15 day visit indeed gets tedious making us long for a real vacation when we come back from this vacation.

Well, more later... for now, with the little history lesson, I am sure the following pictures of billboards (at a busy intersection in Mumbai, apparently) might bring a tiny smile to the dear reader interested in Marketing Strategies :-)

Let's start with Jet Air:



To which Kingfisher Airlines added:



And, Go Air responded:


While Indian Railways reminded:


Now, am not so sure the Busline message at the very top was not Photoshop-ed in...

I didn't get a chance to resize the pictures to be easy enough to read, but, I think the messages are clear enough ;-)