| Complaint filed by | |
| Complaint filed on | January 10th, 2024 |
| Complaint filed against | Mumbai Airport Arrival, Qatar Airways |
- Text of Complaint by Andre Furtado
The Mumbai Nightmare: Unconscionably Incompetent Service to the Disabled.
Next comes the nightmare of all nightmares. As we exited the plane t Mumbai, we asked the air hostesses where we might find the wheelchair attendants. She suggested we walk ahead. We had to keep walking and each time we saw a local employee of the airport and asked where we would find wheelchairs, each time they merely said “Ahead”. “Aghe Milega” Finally, we got to. a location where there were at least five attendants standing around with wheelchairs in the vicinity next to a motorized passenger cart. Not one of the wheelchair people responded. I even asked in Hindi, which they all understand. They all merely pointed to the motorized cart.
I assumed we would be taken on the motorized cart to immigration, and I felt this was a step forward. Instead, we were dropped off about a half kilometer short of immigration and there were no wheelchairs to take us to the immigration site. My question is why not? It would seem to be the sensible thing to do. The cart should be used to move everyone directly to the immigration area and there is where the wheelchairs should be located to help people through the lines. We kept asking for wheelchairs again and again, but as usual they kept saying “Ahead”. Then finally I got “After, you get out of immigration.”
We got through immigration, without a wheelchair for her, and thankfully the lines were short, or my wife might have collapsed, and though we could see several attendants with wheelchairs in the Duty-Free area before Customs, and again asked for my wife, and again they said “Ahead.”
Then we got to baggage claim and by this time my wife was totally exhausted with the effort with no employee of the airport willing to help with the situation.
WHY DON”T YOU HAVE SEATING AVAILABLE IN THE BAGGAGE CAROUSEL AREA FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE OLD AND TIRED AND ARE NOT ABLE TO GET A WHEELCHAIR EVEN THOUGH IT HAD BEEN ORDERED WHILE BOOKING THE FLIGHT THROUGH QATAR AIRWAYS AS FAR BACK AS APRIL 18 2023?
We then got to the baggage carousel and waited, with my. wife standing, as no wheelchair or any place to sit was found nearby. We waited and waited until no more bags emerged, and I told my wife to stay with the luggage until I went to file a report with Qatar baggage claims. They quickly informed me that my bag was not even loaded on the flight and as usual it took some time to file the report. The bag was delivered a day and a half later and I am thankful for that prompt attention.
I then went to pick up a cart to move our luggage to customs and found my wife weeping and sobbing uncontrollably. I asked her about what happened, and she told me she fell because she could not stand any longer with the baggage and collapsed on the floor. A hundred people gathered around her, but not one lifted a finger to help her. It was as if they were watching entranced, looking at a dying animal, she told me. I will say again if the reader has not quite got the picture. When she looked back at them, she felt the onlookers made her feel that they were watching a dying animal. The Qatar baggage claim area was 40 feet away.
What is unconscionable is that there were many airport employees around the luggage carousel. You could not walk without tripping on one. Some of them were in official uniforms way above the ranks of wheel-chair attendants.
Is there no one to watch out for passenger security and safety in the wealthiest city in India?
What was worse was that she could not contact me on our American phones as she could not connect with wi-fi at the Bombay airport because one must fill out a form online and request a pin first. It is not automatic. I. myself had some difficulty making the connection on my phone until I got it to work. It asks for an OTP that appears only after 10 minutes on your phone, after making the initial announcement about it being sent.
Then she asked the gathered people to call the police for her as she could not do it. The airport employees in the group started laughing when she said that. She could not believe she was experiencing this situation in a crowded airport with so many airport employees all around. She will never ever forget or forgive the sheer inhumanity of this incident as long as she lives. Only a video of her experience could have done justice to the inhumanity of it.
When I got back and understood the situation, I immediately rushed to the area near the Qatar baggage claim where there were three wheelchairs, and three wheelchair attendants sitting around chatting. I asked for a wheelchair to help move my wife. The first question they asked was “Which airline did you come by”? It should not matter in an emergency like this.
They informed me that all wheelchairs were broken. I then approached the Qatar baggage area itself and someone beckoned one of the attendants to use the wheelchair to take my wife past customs, and it turns out to have been a wheelchair that the attendants initially said was broken. These must have been antique wheelchairs as they are the only ones not to hold bottom racks to stow away some luggage that every other airport clearly had.
We have traveled all over the world and never ever had an experience where my wife was treated like a dying animal. She just could not stop sobbing until well after we left for the family residence in Marine Drive, Mumbai, about 20 kilometers away. Who would have thought that a business class travel would turn out to be much worse than any air-travel I have experienced in the 81 years of my life?
The problem with serving wheelchair bound passengers is endemic to Mumbai. The people who are the attendants are often uneducated, poorly trained, and undisciplined. It is hard to find one that takes his responsibility seriously. That problem falls squarely in the lap of the management, and I am sure one must go very far up the supervisory chain to have any hope of dealing with this issue. Even the immediate supervisory staff in this area is unpolished No matter what airline I have used to arrive at Mumbai, it remains the worst place I have ever travelled to, when it comes to. handling wheelchair bound passengers.
No one arrives near the gate to greet passengers and even when you find them and demand service, once just gets blank stares. It is incredibly infuriating that this situation continues to exist, even as the many airlines that land in Mumbai continue to wash their hands off the problem and address it much as ostriches burying their head in the sand. They need to pool together, through their global airline association, and make a united demand for responsibility from the local staff where none exists. FYI, I have registered a complaint about poor handicapped services at Mumbai airport and addressed it to Delta, KLM, and the Mumbai airport staff four years ago.
Mumbai airport had a recent makeover, and the Indian Government is touting it as one of the most modern airports in all of Asia. The money spent to make it more opulent would have been much better served by increasing the fleet of motorized carts for disabled passengers, and by training their wheelchair assistance employees that their job is not the sinecure they thought it to be. Half of them need to be fired on the spot, but I know well enough that it might trigger a strike if any such action is taken. There are strategies in place to protect the incompetent.
What are you going to do for us so we don’t have the same experience on our return March 12 to USA via Qatar Airways? APOLOGIZING IS NOT ENOUGH
Andre Furtado
81 year old retired Professor of Mathematics
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan , USA
I am planning to send a copy of this complaint to Prakash Tulsiani also. I also plan to forward it to the Hindu newspaper, if you are not able to set the situation straight for us on our return March 12.
My India Phone Number 900-496-0916
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