Jun 14, 2012

The Dhaka revisit

This time i want to exclusively spend time mentioning on the Hotel we stayed. As the only place we were there other than the Customer meeting was at Eastern Residence Hotel. If you are looking for a right decent hotel in Dhaka while on official travel, this may be an ideal choice. If you take rooms in a group say 2 or three then there is a drawing room sort of space which can be used used exclusively by your group. This drawing room has a couch, TV and a dining table. This gives you a feel of being at home than being at a hotel. Rooms are good and decent with a separate AC per room. It can get quite hot in Dhaka and is difficult to stay without an AC even for person like me who is from temperate region.

They have this unique fruit basket and a welcome drink which i have not seen in any other hotel. Their breakfast is included in their hotel package. The breakfast is decently spread with fruits, breads, roti/dals (If you are an Indian foodie please ask for red roti as common roti in Bangladesh is made of Maida), cereals etc. Better take coffee as somehow my tea taste does not find tea here attractive. They have room service and food quality is good, so we never bothered to go out of the hotel for food any other time as well. Another attraction if you are in company group is to have a group dinner among yourselves in the drawing room with no chatter of any typical public restaurant.

I am here after two years and it seems Dhaka has improved by leaps and bounds. They are getting ready to host the ICC T20 World cup in 2014 and expects to get a lot of infrastructure project completed by then. So till then you see some roadblock around and get a local taxi driver who can take you through inner gullies of Dhaka to the place of meeting else you may spend more time on road. The one thing you cannot miss in Dhaka is the sheer number of cycle rickshaw and it seems they can take you even beyond 5 Kms. We are seeing new public transport buses and a lot of beautification activity from airport to lakes and slowly it is feeling like any bustling developing city in India.

The revisit also was different as I used Biman Bangaldesh as most of the Indian aviation industry in out of Dhaka except for Jet Airways. There was a huge difference in the pricing and hence opted for Biman though i had not used it before based on feedback from my colleagues. The onward journey was uneventful and even i had made up my mind to use it henceforth. There was a delay of over an hour but thought it is ok for the difference in pricing. The return turned to be quite an eventful journey.

"Inshallah We will be in Kolkata in 40 mins"... I thought is like any other prayer but they literally meant it. We were on BG 091 flight from Dhaka to Kolkata on Friday June 16th 2012 which was delayed for take off from Dhaka. I had a connecting Indigo flight from Kolkata to Bangalore at 2PM a decent transit time. After announcing that the flight is about to land at Kolkata, there was a cryptic message telling that "Due to technical reason, we are going back to Dhaka". To Dhaka!!  As one passenger was questioning the decision as like me he also had a connecting flight, the airhostess summed up the seriousness of the scenario by saying "First let us land safely before deciding about future course of action". There were hectic activity in the cockpit with two biman personal who was also in the flight.

We were on the way back to Dhaka. I could see the face of a Airplane personal and it showed the confusion in his mind and i hope all were think "Inshallah we will land in Dhaka". After landing in Dhaka, we were told about the technical issue. The issue was landing gear did not open at Kolkata and hence they returned the flight back to Dhaka. Not sure how it opened in Dhaka and not in Kolkata. Happy to have landed uneventfully. I had a chat with air personal and he told me they had similar issue with this flight in 3 days back. 3 days back and still they are flying it!! I do not know if they have anything like aircraft regulator like DGCA, FAA etc. May be their fear of DGCA might have made them fly back or the cost involved in repair in India as one passenger put it. But the statement also made me slightly happy as this is not the first time Biman air team was handling a similar situation.

Then back in Dhaka by the time i made the call the Indigo flight could not be cancelled and i have lost 9K and then any alternate direct flight was 22K. Am I going to pay more than what i saved? Luckily there was a connecting flight by Jet airways through vizag from Kolkata to Bangalore which was 12.5K. So atleast it is still cheaper than the Jet option had i booked it. Having no surety on Biman will land in Kolkata and even was afraid if they do not fly the same flight which had issue again. Finally they announced that by 1.30PM there will be a new flight from Dhaka to Kolkata and it did fly exactly on time for a change and with the same crew. This new flight took us to Kolkata without any issue. We heard some sound from the engine side but the crew said it is a small issue and the sound will go away after it flies. We had to trust the crew. Kudos to the team which is keeping the airline flying even with such bad machines.

Earlier at biman counter to get my boarding pass even though i had no check-in luggage took me 30-45 mins as there complete mess on who handles what. failure of computer reservation. A queue where i have waited for 15mins just closed itself saying there is some software glitch. We had to go to other queue which were already very big, Some words in Bengali and angry passengers made them to start a new counter. Then i was in a immigration queue where i found that i was in a bangladesh passport queue though it was written foreign passport. They took me to the right queue but then i find that the immigration person telling me that my flight is missing in his system. Missing .. when the flight is just 40mins from now.. Finally he found it and my passport was stamped.

But to all the passenger thinking of flying in Biman bangaldesh and its saftey record, think 100 times before flying it as it may never land!!