Here’s my two cents on travelling

As many of you may have noticed by now, we travel a lot. The reasons might be different but we enjoy exploring new places. Sometimes our trips are planned well in advance but not always. I thought of sharing what we have experienced during our recent trips. This may save you time, energy, money and most of all peace of mind.

Last year in the beginning of December Munich experienced record break winter snow storm. Not just air but even the ground transport was shut down for a couple of days. The overall operation of air traffic system was not fully functional even at the end of the first week in December. Being a frequent traveller we try not to have more than one layover for our journey but this time for one or the other reasons we planned a route Bergen-Frankfurt-Munich-Bangalore. Lufthansa has recently started this new route Munich to Bangalore with good reviews.

The plane from Munich was half empty due to cancelling and rescheduling of flights to Munich, Germany. The food on the flight was good and the journey was great. The formalities on Bangalore airport went quite smooth but to our surprise our baggage didn’t arrive 😥. This has happened for the first time with us. Without losing time we were at the baggage lost counter, the staff was supportive and even filled out our form. We were told that our baggage was in Frankfurt and will arrive “today”. Today is a confusing word at 2 am in the morning. We were supposed to travel to Mysuru (Mysore) and stay there for 2 days hence we gave our Mysore hotel address.

Next morning without fail we checked our online baggage missing form. Our Indian phone number was not on the form instead our foreign number was mentioned which was incorrect. Could you imagine the stress we felt at that time? There is no way to go back to the same desk once one is out of the airport.

Just to make sure that someone at Lufthansa customer service will help us correcting the phone number mentioned with our complaint online, we tried the given phone numbers on Lufthansa website non-stop. Most of the time we waitied in queue and when it was supposed to be our turn the call got dissconnected. Just before the closing time someone took phone and gave me another number to try as the call got connected to a wrong line (do you believe this 😡). Anyways the number was not working. We didn’t expect such treatment from a renowned airlines and especially when our tickets were not the cheapest. Luckily we got our baggage after 2 days.

The places and airlines might be different but there might not be much difference in the way such things are managed. A colleague shared similar experience with KLM for UK-Amsterdam-Norway journey. In India at least there was a counter. Here in Norway one has to do all formalities online. God save the ones with minimal internet experience and no pc. How could everyone be tech savvy?

Anyways the two most important points are

• Never put everything in check-in bag. If one is traveling away from home, it is better to keep a set of clothes, necessary items and medicines in hand bag. Just keep in mind the carry-on baggage rules for airlines. We try to keep our hand bags light to avoid any inconvinience during transit.

• It’s better not to cancel your ticket right away because one reads about some kind of weather warnings. Insurance companies will hardly entertain the claim in such situations. Let the airlines proposes some solution. No problem if the tickets are super cheap and hotel and the other travel costs are not involved. Which are quite rare anyways. Our last travel experience justify this.
  • In case if you haven’t seen this – https://mazeepuran.wordpress.com/2024/01/20/one-dramatic-wednesday/

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

The above image was taken at a coffee plantation site near Coorg in south India. We were there the next day we reached Mysore. Even though our baggage didn’t arrive we decided not sit in our hotel room and be sad, instead we went ahead with our plan. It was a good decision.

Fresh filter coffee at the coffee plantation.