“Can Sir not book online?”

Or, how Vistara and CSIA gave design thinking a miss.

Do you ever wonder what life could be like when you get really old ? I did and was left feeling disconcerted.

Last week I was travelling out of Mumbai’s T2 — the Rs. 12000 crore Public Private Partnership airport that was our city’s biggest infra project in several years. It took a few months of use to figure out the airport was high on style but low on substance. A lot more months later and realisation dawned that those who manage the airport had little desire to attend to the nitty gritty of passenger needs but more on that later, perhaps in another post.

The latest episode though has me on the fence on accountability for passenger welfare.

I was booked on Vistara and breezed thru bag drop off.

I was however, in the company of a senior citizen booked on Air India to the same destination at about the same time. AI had sent an sms of a flight delay that he spotted as the car was pulling up on the Departures ramp.

He resigned himself to waiting out the extra 90 minutes, when another sms popped up — the flight would be delayed a further few hours. Not wanting to risk travelling later in the day he decided to cancel the AI ticket and travel by Vistara.

Seats were available ( at Rs. 7590 per ticket while his original AI set him back Rs. 2300) but guess what. The booking could not be made inside the airport terminal!

The very polite, very courteous but very firm staffers insisted he’d have to leave the terminal building, cross the very busy Departures Level road, hop over to the Vistara ticketing counter, book his ticket and scamper back to the terminal and check in.

Imagine you are 85.

Imagine you have luggage.

Imagine trying to do this when you are travelling alone or in the company of another senior.

The strain. The stress. The difficulty.

An airline staffer needs to accompany you to Gate3, where s/he fills a register on reason for passenger exits. Then you go out, dodge cars and bags being unloaded, walk a few metres to the booking counter and buy a ticket.

I handled the ticketing but it was a pretty intense experience. (Vistara’s staffers were kind enough to permit me to do this and for that mercy, bless them; although one did ask, oblivious to the mild ridiculousness of the question when standing at the airline’s customer service counter: “can Sir not book online?”)

The rebooking was only possible because we’d arrived at the airport a full two hours before departure time. As usual the queues at Security were long and unlike say, Bengaluru airport, T2 has no separate queue for seniors. A kind CISF inspector permitted the senior to use the business class xray station. It was a huff and a puff and if you have any experience with senior citizens you know how much they dislike, nay, fear, being rushed.

None among Vistara’s many staffers could explain why they couldn’t accept credit card bookings when they have someone seated for customer service at a check in counter. Why the need and the risk of sending passengers outside the terminal building ?

Is it an airline practice? An airport management rule? A DGCA diktat?

As this paper notes, ”Designing for aging requires focused expertise, considerations, and principles for bringing about effective solutions. While there is vast knowledge within each of these areas of knowledge and practice, little has been discussed and presented at the intersection of the two — design thinking and aging.

Elements of the seven phase P process that forms the core of design thinking appear in the actions of the director of an architecture firm, Corgan, who wore a 30 lb age simulation suit to help her mimic the experiences of an older person as a way of learning how to design spaces for those with mobility limitations especially in the travel sector.

I don’t know that any of this even enters the thought process of folks who manage airports or airlines in India. Or even if they would be interested in understanding that design thinking is at the heart of customer service.

“Senior boomers”, (a term used by a lady interviewed for the NYT article) are a reminder that we’ll all be frail one day. We will have slower reflexes and the mind and body won’t quite play along . Should we then expect to be deprived of access to public spaces and barriers in private ones? Is it also not likely that we may not be able to age “in place” either physically or financially ? Do we imagine we will resign ourselves to sit at home and mould?

PS : As the senior citizen was walking on the aerobridge into the aircraft, his phone beeped. It was yet another sms from Air India :

Your flight has been cancelled.

Just another day for our beloved national carrier.