Booking my flight to India

This afternoon, I was booking my flight to India.  There are not many airlines flying direct to Bangalore.  I am not adventure enough to take an internal flight inside India, so my options are limited.

The most straight forward path is taking Air Canada/Lufthansa, making a transfer in Frankfurt.  The connection time is perfect, not much time is wasted in the airport.  The itinerary looks great except it is flying via Europe.  India is exactly 12 time zones away from Vancouver, so flying west should be the same as flying east.

Only Singapore airline have direct flight to Bangalore.  Somehow, the travel booking websites somehow couldn’t route the flight via Singapore.  They always route it through Europe.  I have to print out Singapore airline’s flight schedule and try to work out the connect flights myself.  Singapore airline only flies 3 days a week form Vancouver to Singapore, so I can’t leave on Friday as planned.  The flight arriving at 11p.m and the daily flight from Singapore to Bangalore is at 10p.m.  The timing of the connect flight is not looking good.  I can also fly to San Francisco first, then to HK, then to Singapore and catch the direct flight to Bangalore.  It will be 3 stops compare to 1 stop taking Lufthansa, not very desirable either.

At the end, I book with Lufthansa to save the trouble.  For the 2nd trip, maybe I will stop by HK and try the SFO route of Singapore airline.  Too bad that HK has no direct flight to Bangalore, yet.  Dragonair will have daily flight to Bangalore starting May 1.  Taking Cathy Pacific and Dragonair, stop over in HK would be the best flight itinerary.

4 thoughts on “Booking my flight to India”

  1. flying east is faster, just like flying to toronto is faster than from toronto to vancouver, all about westerlie winds. take care, watch the hygiene of food.

  2. Make sure you have enough time for transfer in Frankfurt. It can take long. 2 hours is safe. Eventhough you are not leaving the airport, you still need to go through immigration, and then security. And you may need to go through security twice, once after immigration, and again before entering the plane waiting area. And you are lucky if your plane can park at a gate with connecting bridge to the terminal. I flew through Frankfurt a few times last year, and only once I can walk onto the plane directly from the terminal. All other time, I need to take the bus. Imagine, if it’s a 747, it takes several buses to get all the passengers to/from the terminal. And they may not have enough buses to take all passengers in one shot. That means you will need to wait for the bus to get to the terminal and come back… Frankfurt airport is a little chaotic. The air traffic way exceeds the airport capacity.

  3. There is direct flight from HK to Mumbai. I had been there once for work 2 years ago but have no interest to visit India again. The place is very primitive and dirty. Look like CHina during the 70’s.

  4. There is a 2.5 hours gap in my Frankfurt transfer. Probably LUfthansa time it right.

    India is not fun. I read the tourist book cover to cover, but I don’t see anything interesting except Taj Mahal.

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