Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Horrible experience at the Chennai International Airport

On Nov 2nd I was about to travel from Chennai To SFO. On this regard I came to the
Chennai airport on Nov 1st around 11pm.

My parents were with me at the time. I was speaking to them for some time and spending
my time there. Since the flight is at 3am I got into the airport around 12 mid night.

I had carried 2 checkin bags with me and a hand luggage. I got into the Cathay pacific counter
and did the checkin of the checkin bags and got my boarding pass with no hassle.

During this time I found that the airport was fully crowded with lot of people around. I realized
that there are many air crafts which are about to take off along with Cathay pacific.

For example there were people waiting for Cathay pacific, air france, british airways, singapore airlines, air india etc.

After my checkin when I went to the immigration queue, it was over crowded and there are not much staff to handle the situation.

Since my flight is at 3am, I thought coming to the airport 3 hours before is sufficient enough to catch the flight that was not so.

After finishing the immigration clearance after about an hour, I had to stand in the huge queue of security clearance.

I see most of the people waiting in that line got frustrated with the way the staff were treating the travelers.

It took more than 2 hours to clear the security and I had reached the air craft around 3.30am.

And the flight took off around 4am instead of the scheduled time of 3am. The problem lies in the way the things are handled in the chennai airport not because of the flights them selves.

I think the airport requires massive restructuring with respect to handling the travelers. Even though there is exponential growth of travelers from this airport the staff are not trained enough to handle the crowd.

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