Flight ratings - whats the big deal?

Booking an early morning flight, for business, is always a tricky thing. Depending on your meeting start time (say 10 AM), you'd have to allow room for some buffer beyond the budgeted time, for landing at the airport and taking a taxi to the meeting location. You'd definitely need to allow atleast 45 to 60 minutes buffer time for any delays. 

But what if your flight gets delayed by upto an hour? All your pre-planning and scheduling goes right out of the window. So, thats some more slack time needed. However, the frustrating thing for me is that all this buffer cuts down on 'precious' early morning sleep time. Proper sleep on the day of travel is anyway a rare commodity, since I've found that you need to be up by 4 AM for a 7 AM flight. 

Same is the case with the night return flights. You budget time to get back home at an 'earthly' hour, say by 11 PM. Flight schedule changes and airport traffic congestion easily add up another 60 to 90 minutes.

This brings me to the question. Why don't travel sites show ratings of a flight's past performance? Is it usually on time? How is the service? How is the food quality? This can easily be aggregated from customers, post the travel. Since delays could also be due to airport traffic congestion or other reasons beyond a carrier's control, the feedback on timeliness could be on whether the boarding happened on time.

I'm surprised that none of the airline travel webistes do this today. This is a tried and tested feedback loop in other industries - think cab aggregators like Uber/Ola, hotel booking aggregators like Tripadvisor. In the travel segment, by aggregators like redbus (sample given here). The closest site I could find was flightstats, which is a dedicated website on past flight statistics and has other means of data collection since it doesn't have a customer feedback loop to leverage (see image below).

Simple bus ratings from redbus.in	FlightStats rating summary

BPD: Culmination at Kolkata

(BPD: Culmination at Kolkata, 2-3 May '15)

Starting from the Bhutanese border of Phuentsholing on the 2nd May, I was headed towards Kolkata for the last leg of my journey that I had booked from Kolkata to Hyderabad, for the Sunday night. The journey from Phuentsholing to Siliguri takes about 4 hours, and its best to take the Bhutan bus that makes several scheduled trips in a day between these 2 places. Getting a little lazy to do pre-bookings and not wanting to block a time for departure, I decided to take the Indian buses and/or shared-taxis. This became yet another break journey with multiple stops and ended up taking over 6 hours on the whole. The route taken was Phuentsholing- Jaigaon- Hashimara- Birpara- Lataguri- Siliguri.

From Siliguri, I had booked a Volvo bus for the overnight journey to Kolkata. Climbing in, I was greeted at my seat in the bus by some mellowed barks and I was pleasantly surprised to find a 50-day old German Shepherd as my next seat companion! The interesting set of travel partners continued through the trip. Accompanying her was a dog-fanatic, who had just bought her at Siliguri from a dealer to add to his family of 2 other dogs, a wife and parents. He gave me a low-down of the dog breeds and how easy it is to adopt most of them and what little maintenance they can demand, from a first-timer like me.

Just as I was about to fall asleep, this last booking for a 'comfortable', event-less travel was meant to end up with some trouble. Interestingly, throughout the trip, I had absolutely no problems with any of the travel in shared modes by shared-taxi, auto, local bus and the like throughout Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan. Starting with a list of issues in the Volvo bus like leaking and malfunctioning AC, a faulty battery, insensitive driver, and a bus in such a bad condition that it wouldn't start after dinner break without being pushed by the passengers! The extremely bad condition of the roads didn't help either and after long delays of over 4 hours and a mini-revolt by all the passengers, the bus finally reached Kolkata by 12 noon. Shaken and dust-gathered, I got out of the bus to the sweltering summer weather of Kolkata. Perhaps, this contrasting scenario was a gentle, yet final reminder of how well things had panned throughout my 2-week trip, for which I had to be thankful!

At Kolkata, I was getting reunited with Premjit, the buddy from college and the star of our famous Agra trip! I had a great time at his place with his family and particularly his 6-month boy, the ever-adorable Baby Bang. I was treated to a sumptuous lunch of Chelo Kababs at the famed heritage restaurant, Peter Cat at Park Street, and topped up with a masala chai at a Dhaabha nearby. Catching up with stories from the college and experiences from the company he had founded, we severely ran short of time. After the good, short stop for the evening, I got a ride to the airport to complete my return journey.

Chelo Kabab at Peter Cat (Pic source: tripadvisor)

Landing in Hyderabad, and walking towards the exit, I was welled with a range of intense emotions from the great travel experiences, amazing variety of places seen, wonderful friends made for life and the humbling learnings from the 16-day backpacking trip. I promised myself to complete writing the experiences with a picture-blog, internalize the learnings as part of my day-to-day activities and get back on the travel circuit soon!