CHENNAI: This weekend, people who were flying to and from Chennai spent less time looking at the airport’s display boards and more time on their smartphones. Candy Crush being a deadly way to kill time notwithstanding, airline apps have been faster and more updated than display boards at the Chennai Airport. Airlines like Indigo, Jet Airways and international airlines like Lufthansa and British Airways offer real-time flight updates on their android and IOS apps — that are often quicker than the airport operators.
With fog delays wreaking havoc over the last few days, passengers have had several anxious moments before leaving their homes. “It may sound pretty funny, but my plane went missing off the display board after the delay crossed three hours. After that I switched over to checking the Indigo app on my phone, because it had real-time updates,” said Sajan Krishnan, a construction consultant whose flight was delayed on Sunday.
Over the past four years, seeking information about delays and rescheduling of flights has been done by calling the airline’s call centre, “Trying to reach the call centre of an airline can be really annoying. They keep you on hold for 10-15 minutes and then disconnect. Sometimes they say that servers are down and can’t give too much information at ‘that moment’. Apps are so much better,” said Subbabrata Ghosh, an HR professional who flies at least four times every month.
Most airlines offer SMS updates on flight status — like Air India, for instance — but these are dependent on getting through to the call centre and leaving your mobile number with them. “If passengers ask us for updates and leave their numbers with us, we will supply the information via text message,” said an Air India spokesperson. The national air carrier despite having launched an app recently and upped their social media presence, doesn’t offer real-time flight updates at the moment.
With 3G connectivity and seamless updates through centrally fed data, airlines admit that periods of bad weather are torrid for their call centres.“The call volume is high and our people are always swamped. Especially when there is fog as there is now in Varanasi, Delhi, Jaipur, Chennai and Bangalore, it is unmanageable. But that’s why we send out twitter and sms updates to all customers to check our mobile app for updates. It’s been great because we crossed 100k downloads recently on the android market,” said an Indigo official.
App-solutely updated
Android apps are the most effusively downloaded and used, even for airlines
All airlines have apps available, but real time flight status isn’t available on every one of them
Indigo and Jet Airways are the most popular apps that are downloaded and used in the country