Online Airline Reservations for Travel in India

We're going to be in India soon, and going to travel by air while there, so I tried to book airline tickets via a couple of sites. The gory details of my experience.

Kingfisher Airlines

I tried the web site of Kingfisher Airlines first. I've booked a ticket for myself from their web site before and it all went fairly well. I only met with frustration while trying to pay them: something with their system was broken enough to not accept payment made with my favorite credit card, despite my clarifying with the credit card company that there wasn't any issue with my account (holds, etc.). I finally had to call Kingfisher customer service in India and make a booking using another credit card (even on the phone, they wouldn't accept my favorite card). I was bewildered why this should be and remain convinced there is an issue at Kingfisher's end (either at the web site, or in the back end card verification code) that is the root of this problem.

However, they've been a really good airline all the times I've flown with them (hot meals, multiple channels of TV for all, etc.). Plus, they seemed to have taken a lot of pains to maintain club membership (they FedEx'ed my Kingfisher statement all the way to the USA!) and had recently sent me email with a discount coupon for summer airline bookings. And it's been a while since I made my last booking. So I had to try their site again hoping that all previously encountered payment issues would have been fixed by this time.

In order to use their emailed coupon, I reasoned that I had to sign into my Kingfisher account. But, I'd forgotten my password. So I thought I'd request a password reset and try to set up a new one. That attempt lead me to a screen where I was asked a secret question. Except, they want me to enter that secret question! Imagine the craziness of this scheme: you usually set up a secret question and answer so that the system can pose that question to verify that you are indeed the person requesting a password reset. The Kingfisher system expects you to remember what that secret question was and to enter the question along with the answer so that you can reset the password! I'm sure this is a really secure mechanism, but it largely defeats the very purpose it was built for: a person forgetting his/her password is unlikely to remember the secret question they entered for themselves (especially given the multitude of secret questions one may have set up at various sites where one doesn't have to remember the questions :-)). A call to Kingfisher customer support ensued, and they send me an email with the reset password.

I managed to log into my Kingfisher account and try to apply our coupon. No luck. It just spat out a cryptic "I don't know this" message and wouldn't accept the coupon. So, after some trials, I gave up on the coupon and decided I'd just book the darn tickets and be done with that.

I entered the flight specifications, basic passenger counts, and selected among the fares/flights offered. Despite my clear mention of an infant traveling with us, the fare that came up didn't seem to include the usual nominal charge for an infant. Yet, the passenger counts seemed right and seemed to include the infant, so I had to assume everything was all right. It took me to a screen to enter more detailed passenger information. All information entered, I hit the submit button... and it said (paraphrasing) "Sorry, we couldn't book, try again from the beginning"! It's not clear why this error occurred. It didn't look like the session timed out, but the lack of an infant fare seemed suspicious. So I gave them the benefit of the doubt: I'm sure the fare was wrongly quoted at the first stage, and surmised that this somehow tripped some validity check at the last stage of the booking process.

So I tried again. This time, the fare seemed to come out as expected, with a nominal fee for the infant. We seemed to be on the right track. In addition, the partner pointed out a ticking clock counting down the time left in the session, so I took care to ensure I typed stuff in fast enough (the session time of 15 minutes is more than adequate). I chose the flight, entered the passenger information, and it all went through. So on to the payment and I attempted to use my favorite card again. It brought me to a card verification screen, and I happened to remember my verification password correctly (since I'd just used it at a shopping site), the verification system seemed happy, and.... back at the Kingfisher site with a cryptic message to the effect that there was an error with the payment (not that the verification failed, but some other error). And that I should start again.

I'd had enough.

MakeMyTrip

I'd seen ads for MakeMyTrip ever since my samachar.com days where display ads for the travel site touted cheap fares to India. Plus, I'd heard a classmate from college (who was also a former colleague) had joined the company at the highest levels. So I thought now was as good a time as any to give this site a shot.

The site was a breeze to use overall. I entered the flight specifications and passenger counts, got a list of flights from a variety of airlines, a Kayak-like slide bar to narrow down the flight times, and an option to checkout without creating an account.

Along with the chosen flight, I noticed a rather interesting option for car reservations for pick up to the airport at the source and for drop off from the airport at the destination and decided to try that and make things easy on our relatives. So I entered the address from which we needed to be picked up... and the site gave me a cryptic error about using disallowed special characters. No information was provided about what the offending special character is, just that I am using one that I shouldn't be. So I remove the "#" in front of the house number. No avail. Removed all the commas. No cigar. I was at a loss as to what to do, and was about to give up on the pick and drop off option and just book the flight.

Then I thought, this must be Javascript code that I can look at by viewing the source for the web page, so I should at least be able to see where this error is coming from and although I do not officially know Javascript, most languages are close enough so I should hopefully be able to debug what's wrong. After a bit of debugging, I realize the code hasn't accounted for the use of an apostrophe in the address that I was entering ("Officers' Colony").

So, feeling all duty-bound to inform my classmate, I open up Facebook, locate his name among my friends, and fire off an email, renewing contact for the first time in a while. Also, since I wasted time on debugging this (or maybe I was just showing off?), I also informed him of the bug, while appreciating the pick-up/drop-off feature.

I came back to the reservation from the email, dropped the apostrophe from my pickup address and continued to the section dealing with the drop-off address at the destination. I entered the address and submitted... error again! This time, it says that the address is more than 50 characters long. Hmmm, I wonder, the pick-up address I entered was way more than 50 characters and it didn't complain... why the carping now? But at least it's clear what I should do to fix the problem. I truncate the address (drop the city name), submit by adding the drop off car option, and all looks fine. I click the fast booking without account creation method and... session timed out!

In retrospect, it's reasonable that the session should have timed out. But it seems like the timeout should have occurred sometime when I was sending off that good samaritan email to the classmate. The site had no ticking clock (a la the Kingfisher site) so the customer could be made aware of the danger of a timeout, nor did it prevent me from continuing to enter stuff at the page way after the timeout, waiting for me to instead hit the "checkout" button to take action. Sloppier design than I'd like, but I'm willing to give it another go.

So, I re-entered all the information, carefully ignoring the pot-holes from the previous attempt. I was through to the page to add personal and passenger details. The personal details seemed to require a local cell phone number. The pick-up option had mentioned that information regarding the driver who will be doing the pick up would be SMS-ed to this cellphone. However, I find this popular mechanism of disseminating information, though really convenient for Indians in India, extremely frustrating as someone without a personal India cell number. I've been similarly frustrated at the Bangalore and Hyderabad airports before where access to the airport's Wireless Internet connection can only be obtained via a code that is SMS-ed to you :-(. For our purpose here though, I asked the partner for her sister's number, entered it along with the other passenger information and went on to the payment stage.

The partner then decided that we can use another cell number in India, one that we can possibly keep with us for the duration of our stay there. But I hesitate to hit the back button to go back to the previous stage (this is explicitly prohibited at a lot of such sites, although I don't recall seeing such a warning on this one). There seems to be a helpful panel with numbers for the various stages of the booking process on top of my screen, and I thought I should be able to click one of them to go back to the appropriate stage. No such luck. None of the upper panel consists of click-able links :-(. So I give up and go through with the booking with the cell number as previously entered.

I use the same card as I used with Kingfisher, with the same verification process, and everything goes through this time! The booking is made and we have a confirmation number!

There was one tiny surprise though. I got an email from MakeMyTrip that an account has been created for me, with a temporary password. While I'm wasn't too miffed about this, it did startle me a bit because I thought that the "checkout without creating an account" option was not just for speed, but also potentially for those who didn't want to have an account forever with MakeMyTrip. As it stands, it seems as if all the faster option does is save you the trouble of picking a password (of course, they could have a more convoluted account creation process in the light of which I would have been more grateful for this short cut, but I think that that hardly qualifies as a feature then :-)).

Anyway, I went back in with this newly created account and booked another flight, sailing through all the steps with ease this time, and adding the new cell number. I got the booking confirmations for all the flights almost instantaneously (faster even than Orbitz) and got the E-tickets soon thereafter.

Overall, despite the relatively minor glitches, MakeMyTrip was much easier to use than the Kingfisher airlines site and I'll definitely use it again. I do hope though, that they work on polishing some of my perceived rough edges.

A quick comment on Javascript: It's interesting that this isn't the first time I've run into fairly fundamental-seeming Javascript issues with Indian sites. And, all the times I've encountered such issues, the exception handling mechanisms seem to completely lack grace, neither informing the user helpfully as to what they may have done wrong, nor making an attempt to save state to be reused beyond the correction. The other time I encountered this was at the Indian Consulate web site, where one of their forms required online entry of information, generating a filled PDF form as a result. The form works only in IE, and the consulate did warn of that. But finding it hard to believe that in this day and age, someone could build a browser specific page that other browsers couldn't handle, I had recklessly forged ahead on Firefox. Turns out, what the thing does is that for all non-IE browsers, it eats the last character in a date on the form, reducing the 4-digit year to a 3-digit number and triggering other error checking exceptions as a result. It wasn't clear to me why this error occurred---I can only surmise that the corresponding routine is either not supported in other browsers, or implemented uniquely in IE. Still, this is something a reasonable programmer should be easily expected to catch and fix as part of testing their code, instead of building a largely unnecessary browser dependency. As I said, "rough edges" :-).

Addendum: the classmate responded, ignored the bug report, thanked me for liking the feature, and promised future conversation if we meet. I thought, clearly, this is the stuff that marks leaders: they can look (only?) beyond the problems ;-). It also brought to mind a saying my colleague often quotes: no good deed ever goes unpunished :-).

I can't be this good...

In the context of the recent foiled plot to blow up planes from UK to the USA, I had earlier blogged on Pakistan's role in worldwide terrorism and made the point that by ignoring Pakistan's role in its conflict with India and treating it as some localized issue (and always portraying it as something related to a "freedom struggle" in Kashmir) the American media had, for a very long time now, missed a larger theme that emerges about Pakistan's influence (directly or indirectly) on a spate of worldwide terrorist activity. I gave a specific example of the Indian Airlines hijacking that resulted in India releasing prisoners who were then known to be freely roaming Pakistani cities with no action from the US to pressure the Pakistani government to rearrest these people: these matters were hardly covered in the American press.

Now, as if to complete the circle, this article from Time magazine's online site actually links Maulana Masood Azhar, perhaps the most important of the prisoners released from Indian prisons in exchange for the Indian Airlines passengers, to the recent trans-Atlantic bombing plot. I had linked to an earlier article from NY Times that reported that one of the key players in the bombing plot, a Mr. Rashid Rauf, belonged to the Jaish-e-mohammed terrorist outfit that is well known in India. This Time article goes a step further and actually links him to Maulana Masood Azhar. Of course, this hardly comes as too much of a surprise. However, I did find it noteworthy that there is now some journalistic record that helps "complete the circle".

How insular can NY Times international coverage be?

That's the question I asked myself as I read this piece from the New York Times. The article talks about how, despite the help Pakistan seems to be providing on the so-called war on terror, the perpetrators of a spate of recent terrorist incidents can all be linked, in one way or another, to Pakistan. And what's insular about that? Not one of the incidents noted have occurred in India. No, that doesn't mean either that India is free from terrorism or that Pakistani influence on terrorism happens only when it is directed towards the West. It only means all acts of terrorism in India are blithely explained away in the New York Times under the Kashmir conflict cliche (if you're interested in seeing how the American press follows these patterned coverage models in more local contexts, I highly recommend reading the Daily Howler; the India-Pakistan coverage fits right into the same framework) and deliberately or otherwise, the New York Times in particular and the American press in general, seem to be unwilling to accept the larger pattern that emerges out of all this: that in the India-Pakistan conflict that the West has blithely ignored over the past few decades as some piffling internal quarrel (except for repeatedly playing up the nuclear angle and raising coverage levels when the nations seem to be close to war) lie the seeds for all this. It ignores that in India's repeated accusations over the years that Pakistan is harbouring terrorists and encouraging terrorism (if not by other means, by not cracking down on it with urgency and effectiveness) there has always been more than a kernel of truth which is not given its due. It ignores that by not covering and reporting on what were ominous signs that terrorism was flourishing unchecked in Pakistan they have let one very giant ball drop. (For example, when an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked and flown over Pakistani airspace to Afghanistan, and Pakistan didn't so much as bat an eyelid when the terrorists who were let go in exchange for the passengers entered Pakistan and blithely roamed Pakistani cities, there was no pressure from the US to crack down on these folks and to force Pakistan to re-arrest and send back these people.) It ignores the deep roots of the present grave terror threat in the US policy's insular focus over the decades on helping anyone that can help them (Pakistan in this case) achieve their next short-term goal no matter what the longer term consequences. For me, this insularity in media coverage in turn directs how informed the American people are, and in a vicious circle, crushes any hope for the populace to see the bigger picture and drive for changes in these flawed policies through the force of their vibrant democracy.

Another example of the heavy cost of this insularity can be found in this article. Talking about a Mr. Rashid Rauf, who is said to be an important player in the recent plot to bomb airplanes from Britian to the US, the article says this:

According to Pakistani officials, Mr. Rauf is affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed, the militant Islamic group that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and that is battling Indian rule in the mountainous region of Kashmir. The group has been officially labeled a terrorist group by the United States government and is believed to be responsible for the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Its precursor organization, Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, trained in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. [emphasis mine]

See how the article mentions this in passing and how these terrorists who were just planning to blow up a whole bunch of planes are just "battling Indian rule in the mountainous region of Kashmir"? One presumes that these folks are following the methods of Mahatma Gandhi in that "battle", but somehow suddenly take to terrorism when the West is involved? Am I reading too much into this?

Also, someone should explain another aspect of the NY Times' coverage of terrorism to me. When the suspects in Indian bombings turn out to be Indian Muslims and not directly members of some known terrorist organization, the coverage immediately takes a tone of "this is an internal Indian problem" and that "India repeatedly accuses Pakistan" and the fact that the suspected perpetrators actually turned out to be Indian citizens means that India should instead be "looking inwards", with coverage of Indian Muslims and how India is struggling to keep up its image as a "secular democracy". (Some of these issues are true.) When similar incidents happen (repeatedly now) in Britian and the perpetrators are British-born-and-raised Muslims with Pakistani roots, the coverage quickly moves to the role of Pakistan and how that's a double-edged sword? What about Britian's credentials as a secular-democracy? I know that there have been articles that have begun to look at what's happening inside Britian. But I'm wondering why a jump to Pakistan as a source and building ground for terrorism is made so quickly here, but made with great reluctance, if at all, when equally brutal acts of terror occur (not mere planning) in India?

NY Times and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Yet another NYT article on the Indo-US nuclear deal. This article (Indian-Americans Test Their Clout on Atom Pact - New York Times) focusses on political activity by Indian-Americans in trying to get the deal approved, but as many of the articles by NYT on this issue have done, this one does not mention the argument in favor of the deal. It's all very nice to throw in a group of terms that seem to be related to the issue ("rogue nations", "nuclear non-proliferation", "Pakistani-Americans", rivalry with Pakistan, etc.) but like a name-dropping influence-peddler wannabe, their overall germaneness to the issue is completely missing. In my humble opinion, the questions that none of the NYT articles and their numerous editorials on this issue have dealt with are:

• Yes, India is a non-signatory to the NPT (so is the USA): what part of proliferation has India not obeyed however? And if India is not a signatory to NPT, shouldn't India having "violated" it (no proof of that in the absolute sense of the word proliferation, but yet) the agreement be irrelevant? I know that parts of the NPT call for complete halting of testing and India violated that part by its most recent testing. But isn't that quibbling about the word of the law? After all, everyone knows India already tested in 1974, so it's not as if it didn't have the capability. Does one have to be so openly hypocritical to write NYT editorials?
  
• Is their any proof that nuclear "secrets" obtained by any other nation have originated from India? There is proof that such proliferation has occurred from Pakistan: so why the need to counterbalance every article/editorial with rhetorical questions about treating other nuclear nations unfairly as if there was no difference at all between these nations in terms of their impact on proliferation?
• Do the folks at NYT really see no difference between India on the one hand and Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea on the other so they would worry their heads silly that something done to India would serve as an implicit encouragement to other rogue nations? Can these other nations not see Indo-US nuclear ties under this deal as an explicit encouragement for democratic ideals, voluntary acts of non-proliferation, and strict safeguard of a nation's nuclear methods and capabilities?
• And on the benefit side: haven't the US and India, the world's two largest democracies been at loggerheads long enough? Won't such nuclear cooperation be a sign to India that US is finally serious enough about relations with the world's largest democracy that it is willing to trust it on as sensitive an issue as nuclear technology?
  

What pains me about the NYT coverage of this issue is that they have chosen to criticize focussing on cliches and platitudes without even attempting to address these questions in their coverage.

By the way, I enjoyed this quote in the article. No opportunities for political activity in India? Take your head out of your arse, Mr. Sharma.

Many Indian-Americans have enthusiastically embraced political activity in part "because such opportunities were not always available in India," said Kapil Sharma, a former legislative assistant to Mr. Pallone who helped organize the House India caucus.

Lenovo, IBM, and IIPM

I've been reading updates on the ongoing IIPM fracas in the blogosphere with some interest. Whatever the truth about IIPM's advertisements (and from the posts I've seen, IIPM can hardly defend itself; the problem is such false advertising is fairly rampant :-(), their going after the bloggers was simply out-of-line. However, thinking over things this past day, one thing sticks out like a sore thumb for me. All the stories seem to highlight that Gaurav Sabnis (one of the affected bloggers) resigned from IBM, and although he disclaims that IBM had anything to do with his resignation, the implicit line being towed by the many bloggers (and the mainstream media that has begun to cover this) is that IBM had somehow applied pressure on him to resign, and whether or not they applied pressure, that IBM had a moral obligation to stand up against IIPM's pressure tactics and to defend their employee's basic freedom of speech. The fact that IBM is often the face of American capitalism, and that freedom of speech is a cherished (and sometimes forcibly exported) American value, seems to add an implicit irony to these references. (Maybe I'm reading too much into this? :-))

Which may be all be fine, except, none of these stories seem to demarcate that Lenovo is not IBM! IBM sold it's PC division to Lenovo. Somewhat like the Manto's satire on partition, Toba Tek Singh, what happened as part of that sale is that what was IBM (India) one day, became Lenovo (Pakistan) the next, and those who were working for IBM's PC division now work for Lenovo. (Of course, this change had none of the acrimony of partition, just the tremendous love of money changing hands ;-).)

From Washington Post's coverage of the sale:

Under the terms of the deal, Lenovo would pay $650 million in cash and up to $600 million in common stock. Lenovo would also assume $500 million in IBM liabilities. Once the transaction closes, Lenovo would have about 19,000 employees. About 10,000 IBM employees -- more than 40 percent of whom are already in China and less than 25 percent of whom are in the United States -- would join Lenovo.

There is a hand off period where IBM is allowing Lenovo to continue to use the IBM (and Think) brand names, but Lenovo is its own company. From the CNET story:

Lenovo will be the preferred supplier of PCs to IBM and will be allowed to use the IBM brand for five years under an agreement that includes the "Think" brand. Big Blue has promised to support the PC maker with marketing and via its IBM corporate sales force.

I managed to make the error of thinking that IBM was involved as well, so I'm not sure I blame others for their initial references to IBM in the context of this story. But with all the wonderful facts being dug up on IIPM and its founders by bloggers (and this is solid work by them), maybe it's time to set the record straight and take IBM out of the picture?

• Note: Most of the links on the IIPM story are via Desi Pundit and Amit Varma (i.e., they did all the hard work).
• Obligatory Disclaimer: These views are mine and mine alone (i.e. I do not speak for anyone else).

The Great Indian Cricket Mutiny

Wow! What a mess Indian cricket has gotten into? The email from Greg Chappell at the heart of all this seems balanced enough, but does have the air of a teacher complaining about the head boy to the principal. However, some of the allegations, if true, are fairly serious and, IMHO, should probably cost Ganguly his place in the side. Reports of support for Ganguly from other players is only expected, and shirking of a rigorous fitness regimen (as Prem Panicker points out here) may definitely be spurring some of that support.

It is also likely that Chappell is, rightly, trying to get players used to an Aussie sense of performance accountability. The performance of the Indian cricket team, once seeming as if it had reached an unprecedented high after the victory in Pakistan, has dropped very sharply and alarmingly to an unpleasant depth. While Ganguly can draw analogies to Mark Taylor's dismal run of form as Australia captain, one should also point out that the Aussie team continued to prosper under him. Yet, during Taylor's poor run, there was no shortage of fairly vocal calls for him to resign or to be dropped from many an Aussie great. And when Australia begins to falter in performance, it's clear that the overall records of players (something Ganguly trots out in his defence every time) matters very little in the mind of selectors who want to stem the rot, as the recent dropping of Martyn (a player with a test average of nearly 48) from the test team and Gillespie from the ODI side show. What matters, and what should matter, is what is in the best interest of their cricket team. And the facts in Chappell's email, if true, reflect activities going on at present that are not in Indian cricket's best interest; the faster such issues are resolved, with brutal action if needed, the better.

That Chappell's attitude should rub some of the players the wrong way is clearly expected. Players like Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan have been performing well below par and should attribute a lot of the chances they have recently got to Ganguly's backing. (It isn't clear that backing has helped Indian cricket, however.) Putting together Chappell's email and VVS Laxman's critical comments after the 2nd day of the 1st test, I would speculate that Laxman is among the "senior" cricketers who have talked about feeling very insecure about their position in the side, Chappell's clarification in his email notwithstanding. (Chappell addressing him head on and telling him to forget about a one-day spot, as he admits he did in the email, couldn't have helped matters any, for VVS, if his interviews are to be believed, continues to feel that a one day spot is being wrongly denied him.)

My take on all this is that it's time serious action were taken to correct the rot. If Chappell's allegations are true, it is time to wish Ganguly and any of the other players who are touting their love for him, good bye and god bless. ("Thank you for your services to Indian cricket. We hope you have a nice time with ESPN sports.") There is talent on the sidelines and the faster that talent is put under Chappell's tutelage, the sooner that talent will translate from "raw" to "cooked". The Indian cricket team performance is not far from the nadir, and this is a good time to blood talent that is willing to give their all for the Indian cricket team and its success. What's more, there will hopefully be three all-time greats whose exemplary work ethic will give the newcomers treads they can follow, and who can lend the team a solid spine as it goes through this transition: Dravid, Tendulkar, and Kumble. Under Ganguly, the Indian board slowly adopted the Aussie mantra of giving players sufficient opportunity to prove themselves, and for this Sourav deserves thanks. Under Chappell, it is now high time we also adopt the strict Aussie sense of performance accountability.