This time we travelled United+Jet to India. United Air flight from SFO to HK and then Jet Airways from HK to India. While Jet Airways was a pleasure United flight was a disaster. We are never traveling by United to India again.
Am documenting my experience so that others can benefit.
The problems with United:
1) Horrible food. They served 2 meals only on a 14 hour flight with a boxed sandwich thrown in-between the 2 meals. The quality of the food was not good too. And the variety was non-existent. Just 3-4 items in total. No dahi, No achaar, No salad dressing, no fruits, nothing.
2) They ran out of boxed meals, milk and other items. Also did not handle the Special meals very well.
3) No kids kit for kids and babies. Cathay and Korean give a kids kit for kids which contain some activities etc.
4) No individual TVs. A nightmare if you are travelling with Kids.
5) Very little legroom as compared to Korean.
I think Korean/Cathay/Singapore are much better than anything else.
Korean was decent when you think of the whole package- time,price and convenience.
Korean Staff has improved a lot. They were really helpful with the baby, luggage and other little things.
Food is ok. I guess Singapore is the best. They provided baby food and also gave an extra fruit platter(on request) for Nivriti.
Personal entertainment system is available only on SF-Seoul route.
The issue I think is timing. It lands Mumbai at 2.30 am which means you get out only at 4 am and it starts from Mumbai at 4.00 am.
The stopover from Mumbai -SFO is about 1.5 hrs and SFO-Mumbai is about 2.5 hours.
I flew Cathay last time, and was pretty impressed with the whole package – price, food, personal TV, layover time – everything. Definitely recommended.
I flew Singapore airlines to Singapore on probably their newer planes. Personal tv screens was just the beginning, as they had full connectivity and power ports on every console. You can connect your own ipod into their system, USB ports as well as a network port. This trip was a non-work trip so I used none of the connectivity options but just watched some movies and played games. Indian Vegetarian Meal – food was not the best, but it was always hot and had good variety with pickle, salad, fruit besides the main dish. SQ staff is always open to provide an extra bun and butter, if you ask for it.
We flew the same route united + jet. Service on united is decent, food was very good – 2 proper meals + 1 boxed sandwich. Prashant, they heard your complain, provided yogurt in both the meals + fruit as well. They served thepla + bateta nu shaak for one meal. To my surprise, the theplas were very nice and i was regretting for sending the trays back as the kids were sleeping : (. For milk lovers – They also give milk to adults during the planned juice service that they provide. The lady sitting next to me always drank milk :).
We are looking for our upcoming Indian trip tickets & Prashant was big NO for United+Jet till today. No wonder in the afternoon he pinged to start looking into United+Jet. I am sure he read ur comment about food/Thepla & Dahi 😉
Actually any airline would give milks to adult upon request. Atleast I have not been rejected so far 🙂
Airline fares for Dec this year for normal airlines (Cathay, Korean) are really high as compared to last year. With slightly lower fares on United+Jet one can buy a portable entertainment set and make up for the lost personal TV set. 🙂
What an irony. I had promised myself in this post never to fly United again. Yet I did this time and now I am stuck in Hong Kong writing this post. The United flight developed problems and got delayed 3 hours and as a result I missed the Jet connection. United has now booked me on the next Jet flight which is next day same time. So a wait of 24 hours.
United gave us a hotel for the night – the very nice Marriot SkyCity near the airport. They picked up the tab for the breakfast also although did not give any other meal vouchers.
The food quantity on the airline was still pathetic. Hmmm… this time I should stick to my resolution of not flying United again !!!
Wish me Luck. The journey is not yet over. 🙂