Shipra is my fiancée and the first of contributors at the blog. She has worked with one of the largest airline conglomerates in the world, and is now based in Mumbai. Shipra has lived, worked and travelled across 4 continents. We travel often enough, together and separately. These are her perspectives, as she gets used to the world of business and leisure travel and our hobby! The Novice Perspective: Initiating my Fiancée to Points & Miles I am the person who likes to land at the airport exactly 60 minutes prior to departure, check-in, drop my bags and head straight to board the aircraft. If I had a little extra time in hand then I’d pop into the airport duty…
Lounges
Tag Archives for Lounges.
Review: GVK Business Class Lounge Mumbai Terminal 2
Yesterday, I wrote about the inauguration of the new GVK Lounge at the Mumbai Airport Terminal 2, which came after months of anticipation. I had some work in Delhi today, so I was supposed to take an evening flight from Mumbai to Delhi to get here. The power of mileage tickets, I could just call Air India and swap the ticket from most of their A321 BOM-DEL flights (from Terminal 1) to get a seat on their B77W which flies BOM-DEL-JFK, and hence I could head to Terminal 2 to check out the new lounge. Air India provided me with an invite to the Business Class section of the lounge, located on Level 3, since I am a Flying Returns…
Altitude Lounges: The good yet empty lounges in Mumbai and Delhi
Altitude lounges are the lounges established by American Express in Mumbai CSI airport’s terminal 1 and Delhi Airport’s Terminal 3 on the domestic departures side. These lounges are operated for the credit card franchises of American Express in India, such as the ICICI Bank Jet Airways American Express card and the IndusInd Bank Jet Airways American Express Card. I reviewed the Mumbai lounge and the Delhi lounge last year. Now, both these lounges are excellent in terms of the quality of food and services, much on par with the American Express Lounges operated by Amex for Amex Plat card holders in the two cities. However, they both don’t get any traffic, in spite of being in business for a couple…
Lounge Review: Mumbai Terminal 2 Interim Lounge
Planning the Proposal Trip to Paris One of the trip reports I’ve been holding off for a while, for the lack of adequate time to write it up. Like many of the regular readers on this blog would know, I proposed to my girlfriend in Paris this summer, and she said yes. The first thing to do was to of course, get a flight to go to Paris from Mumbai. Like I’ve mentioned before, I was going to use the Mumbai – Paris flight on Jet Airways A330-200. The context set up here was that we are going on a work trip to Europe, which was total gibberish anyways. We arrived at the Mumbai airport Terminal 2, and headed up…
New Mumbai Terminal 2 Lounge coming in August 2014?
Late last week I was on my way to London Heathrow from Mumbai, and I stepped into the Mumbai Airport’s temporary lounge for a brief moment. The current lounge, like you know, is made at a gate, while they do up the details on the separate First & Business Class lounges at BOM. I ran into someone who I have seen at the host position before, and I enquired when is the new First and Business class lounge due to open. For the first time, I have heard a timeline, of August 2014 when the new set of lounges would be operational. While given the track record of the airport operator, I can be sure August 2014 is not it,…
Review: Pause Lounge, Bangalore Airport (Domestic)
One of my many gripes with Bangalore’s Airport in Devanahalli, apart from the distance, has been the lack of a lounge for the longest time for Jet Airways elites. Hey, they used to give you food coupons to eat in the Food Court, not appreciating that the lounge was not about the food but about the environment. This got fixed last year when Kingfisher evacuated from Bangalore Airport, and this place was made the Pause Lounge, accessible via select credit cards and for 9W elites & Business class travellers. I haven’t been able to sample this lounge for my few trips to Bangalore all this year, so this was my first time when I actually built in time into my…
Finally, you can buy lounge access on a one-off basis
One of the largest set of queries I notice on my blog is that for accessing lounges in India. While I know it makes life easy, airlines & airline alliances offer it to their elite customers only, and credit cards as well extend it to their card holders who hold certain varieties of credit cards. Here is the list of MasterCard and Visa cards based lounge access in India. For those who did not have lounge access via any of the other modes, membership to the Priority Pass or similar programs were necessary. These usually come complimentary along with credit cards, however, users would have to pay a $27 fee per guest per use, unless they had the highest version…
Going RTW: Celebrations Lounge, Mumbai Terminal 2
Introduction & Trip Index < Introduction EY205, BOM-AUH, Etihad Business Class> The flight timings for Etihad to fly out of Mumbai are at a very odd hour at 4:50 AM in the morning. Odd for me I mean. I usually prefer day time flights, or even with a night flight, a departure closer to midnight so that I can get on the plane and go off to sleep at the earliest. Etihad offers a limousine pickup and drop service for customers flying with them in Business & First Class. Since I was flying Business Class between Mumbai to Abu Dhabi and First Class there on to…
Something New: Introduction
Introduction Check-in: ICICI/American Express Altitude Lounge Mumbai Terminal 1A Airborne: Flight AI 660 (BOM-DEL), Air India, Economy Class Check-in: ICICI/American Express Altitude Lounge Delhi Terminal 3 Airborne: Flight AI 657 (DEL-BOM), Air India, Executive Class One of these times in the past couple of months I was going to visit the family in Delhi, I thought of trying out something new, or rather different from my regular experiences in the past months which usually would be Jet Airways and the regular lounges which would include the Carnations Lounge at Mumbai Terminal 1C and the Plaza Premiere Lounge at Delhi Terminal 3. Since this trip was personal and I had to book up in advance, I decided to use a couple…
Get ready to pay for better meals on Jet Airways, and lounge access, and preferential seating
unbundle /ˌʌnˈbʌndl/verb [T] COMMERCE, MARKETING Definition › to start to sell a product or service separately when previously it had been sold together with others. You just saw the definition of unbundling as published in the Cambridge dictionary. Now, this one is going to play out soon by a ‘full-service airline’ in India called Jet Airways. This report published in an English daily a couple of days ago indicates the plans Jet Airways has going forward to increase its ancillary revenue. It says: After low cost carriers, Indian full service airlines are also going to offer passengers the option of pre-booking their desired cuisine for a fee instead of being forced to eat whatever is served without any extra charge.…
A good Klout score is all you need to get into Cathay Pacific’s SFO F Lounge
I’m assuming everyone of you readers reading this has some sort of online social identity via Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. Klout is a site which measures your social influence by looking at all sorts of factors such as number of followers, number of likes on your post and others. They announced an interesting deal with Cathay Pacific yesterday, where a Klout score of 40 or upwards allows Klout users to access the recently-opened Cathay Pacific First and Business Class Lounge in San Francisco. Earlier than today, only F & J customers of the airline, and oneworld elites flying a oneworld-member airline could be the only ones who could access the lounge. Under the terms of the deal, anyone who complies…
