Looks like oktatabyebye was a big hit among bloggers and aspiring travel writers. The last round is still on and many are eagerly waiting for the results. And just when it is about to be completed, I happened to bump into another travel writing contest at sulekha.com. The prizes look lucrative! It is open for all, and all you need to do is submit your journal entry. I tried making a submission yesterday, but the process of uploading images seemed to be really hard and cumbersome, and the uploaded image did not appear in the submission even after playing around with it for 10-15 minutes. So I just gave up on it.
And just for the record, I did contest on oktatabyebye and made the initial cut, but I had to reply as “not available” for meeting in Mumbai/Delhi as well as for travelling on the provided dates. I don’t know if I would ever have qualified, but it is always nice to look for an opportunity to go on a sponsored trip!! 🙂
I had been thinking of a punch line for sometime now, and finally came up with “Journals of an obsessive traveller”, which you are seeing below the title. What do you think? I came up with a few of them and finally chose this one. Here are the other lines that I thought of, some of them very similar:
1. Notes of an obsessive traveller
2. Exploring India…
3. Nomadic expressions
4. Discovering India
5. Discovering grandeur of India
6. Where do we go next?
7. A life full of journeys
8. Experiencing India
There were some more that I can’t recall. What would be your pick?
I read on a news story yesterday that mainstream airlines are fighting back and gaining back the market share that they lost to budget airlines in the last few years. It made me reflect on why I never managed to take a budget airline in my few journeys in the last year or two – a period when new airlines have been launched and prices have been slashed.
Flight cancellations. It is primarily an issue with Air Deccan more than any other airlines. I can tolerate delays for a few hours, since I usually don’t travel on business and never in a hurry. But what I definitely can’t afford is cancellations. You are left in the middle of nowhere and the options you will be left with are to fly paying the full price or cancel your trip – terrible options really. Of course, they are nice enough to return entire money, but that’s not much help.
Refund policy when you cancel your ticket. This is a problem with Kingfisher and Spice Jet. I usually book my tickets 3 to 4 weeks in advance. That means there is a good chance that my travel plans can change. If I want to cancel my ticket, I need my money back, in hard cash – the same way I paid them. I don’t mind some cancellation charges, since airlines do need to recover their operating expenses, travel agent’s fees, etc. So before I book my ticket, I always look at the cancellation rules. Both Kingfisher and Spice Jet have cancellation rules that I don’t like much. Kingfisher gives you credits which you can use later, but no cash refunds. I am not a very frequent flyer and I don’t like these credits; I need my money back. Spice Jet does not return your money at all, you can just kiss good bye to it! These are the rules that I read when I tried booking them online. The mainstream airlines are much friendlier in cancellation – you only pay some cancellation charges and get back rest of the money.
Can’t book an itinerary spread across multiple flights. I needed to fly from Bangalore to Guwahati a few months back. There are no direct flights and it is a one hop journey, stopping at Kolkata. Air Deccan would have saved me Rs.500 if I took their flight to Kolkata. But they don’t take the responsibility of putting me on the connecting flight. Would they get delayed or cancelled, which often happens with them, it is my problem and not theirs. With a mainstream airline, you can make a single booking from starting point to end point. And if you can’t catch the connecting flight, they take the responsibility of putting you on the next available flight.
The money saved is not much. As I said before, I book my flight 3 to 4 weeks in advance. Unless you get a real cheap deal like Air Deccan’s Rs.500 ticket, the price difference is just a few hundred rupees(try it yourself). For example, what would cost Rs.4500 on a big airline might cost you Rs.4200 on a budget airline. I don’t think it is really worth it, especially keeping the first three reasons in mind. A budget airline may be a good option if I have to fly tomorrow, but such an occasion has never come to me. A budget airline may save a lot of money if you are taking a short haul flight(like Bangalore to Chennai), but I usually travel by bus or train for short distances. So I never really got a chance to save substantially by opting for budget, and I never did fly a budget airline, yet!