New Bangalore Airport Sucks!

This is my 50th blog! This is my last moment in Bangalore, and my flight is leaving soon. Now I need to consider whether to continue my blog or not. I would need to try to juggle my work and blogging time now, since there is no more 1 hour taxi ride.

Anyway, I would like to thank all readers across the world for reading my blog for the past 1 month. My statistic is not that impressive, but at least I know my thoughts are well-read.

It’s September 11 and I am going to board a flight soon. It around 9pm here and I’m in the world LOUSIEST newly build airport – Bengaluru (Bangalore) Airport. Want to know why? Read on….

I arrived the airport at 6:30pm and was informed that the check-in counter will only open at 7:30pm so I went for the only café to get a sandwich and coffee - Café Coffee Day. So I had not choice but try to munch my food slowly to get through my 1 hour. By the way, Café Coffee Day is Bangalore’s Starbuck replacemnet. Their slogan is ‘A lot can happen over coffee’ and the first thing came to my mind after reading the slogan is being choked by coffee.

Trying to spend one hour eating was really hard for me, so, I went snapping photo.

(Above: Where is everyone?)

When the counter opened, I was the first person to queue up (Kiasu person is like that one). But the lady at the counter told me that the system had a problem printing boarding pass and I had to wait for a while. I waited for around 30 minutes and they still have not fixed the problem. Then the lady at the counter told me that I had excess baggage of 7kg. Wow! Where on earth did I come up with additional 7kg? Trying not to argue, and praying my company would help me pay, I gave in and was directed to another counter.

In Bangalore Airport, there was no sign of ‘Excess Baggage’. I walked around the area looking for that sign until I became frustrated and consulted the information counter. The guy directed me to ‘Air India SAT Service Counter’.

I handed in my itinerary with the excess weight information to the girl at the counter. She stared at the for a while; and then asked me which counter I was checking in just now. After that she went disappeared for about 25 minutes. When she appeared, she asked me for my ticket number and I replied that I had no idea because my itinerary was all I used to check in and the lady at the check-in counter directed me to this location. So hearing this, she disappeared again.

When she appeared, she asked for my credit card. I find this part pretty amusing, the latest airport which just opened a few months ago, and this particular lady was swiping my credit card the OLD way – using a bulky machine and place my credit card underneath a paper and swiped it! It took her 10 minutes to master this.

After that, it was another 5 minutes stamping the receipts carefully. And guess how much I needed to pay? 3710 rupee!

I spent almost 1 extra hour for the whole check-in procedure!

So, the next thing is the immigration clearance; but was asked to fill up the departure card. When I tried to borrow from him, he refused saying that he only had one. But no one was queuing up, and he could just lend me the pen and gave me a few minutes to fill it up! I had no choice but to beg for pen from other passenger.

When I manage to fill up the departure card, the counters were closed for 15 minutes!

After 15 minutes, I finally managed to enter the international boarding hall and passed the security clearance.

There are just a few shops inside the hall, such as Duty Free Shop,

Watch Shop

Pizza Hut ( where the worker need to understand that I was taking photo of the shop and not her)


Kingfisher Bar

and etc….

Another thing that frustrated me was that when I tried to connect to the internet, I had to sms for a password. I sms 3 times and no response at all!
In addition, there was no power socket around.

So actually I ended publishing this blog in Changi airport at 7:13am!