Deccan Airlines

I travelled on Air Deccan for the first time last week . The price being almost same as 3rd AC train and the significant time saving changed my decision towards travelling on deccan even if I was apprehensive about flying on deccan. I would attribute it to the word of mouth advertisements about deccan like the flight maintainance is very bad, the flights are really dirty, the flights are overbooked ,the worst thing is the flights are never on time and above all that you would never be sure about your check in baggage which can be very easily misplaced. 

I am not sure if I was lucky because you cannot arrive at a conclusion on all the above things by just travelling once.But my experience was quite different.

To start with the flights were on time , although there was no seats reserved(which I still think is not a good idea) but there was no confusion in terms of getting seats . The flight was almost full as it was coming from Delhi. The good part is you can find a good girl and go and sit beside her. And there were some good delhi girls ofcourse on the flight.

The flight was over all clean and the maintainance if not too good but was ok - may be because the flight has just started in this sector.

But what caught my attention is the effort to get advertisements inside the plane for example the ICICI advertisement on the head rest, the NDTV advertisement on the baggage area .Well its a goodway to get some money from other means and pass the benefits of low cost flights to the customer. Deccan can look for more such options as this is a good means to get the attention of customers for a full period of 2 hours.

Besides there was some selling of consumer goods on flights which I believe should be done more intensively.The airlines should try and gauge what a consumer might buy in such a short period.One thought is lot of people would be travelling to meet their dear ones and they can have some nice gifts which people can buy for their dear ones. I believe the airlines is already involved in selling water and food material but they should not charge a premium on that. 

But the decision to fly on deccan for all the people would be driven by the same philosophy - cheap tickets. But can money alone be the only driving factor as compeition hots up.So its hould start looking at improving if it has to stay fit as a business.What deccan should do is to try and fix the small issues such as luggage displacement, over booking which are more of setting setting up a system rather then short term fixes like writing the destination by chalk which is a manual process and can lead to errors.Besides it can try keeping the plane clean and inside maintained by using part of the money from advertisers to do so.And then it should try to do some advertisement for itself on these fixes and not rely only on prices as a differentiator. And leave the word of mouth to spread right or wrong information about the airlines which might affect it in the long term as compeitition hots up.