Bhutan & India Tour, Sept & Oct 2006
The trip was really great……there were two mess ups that occurred that were related to the Druk Air tickets……..otherwise things were awesome….and our guide, Sonam, was especially awesome……Wes and I made our flight connections into Bangkok without any problems, however, it was not clearly explained to us that we would have to present our hand written Drukair tickets to a special location for an actual boarding card to be created. Instead we went straight to the DrukAir departure gate (we had tons of time in BKK airport as we had a 6 hour layover) and at the time of boarding we were turned away while the rest of our group went on without us…….I am not familiar with “hand written” tickets as I have not seen them for many years……this was extremely frustrating that we did not have this instruction with our departure instruction as part of our tour! Thank heaven for China airlines allowing us to use their airport lounge where we were able to email DrukAir in Bhutan and they offered us the local phone number in Thailand of the DrukAir office manager (since the office in Bangkok had closed from the old airport and it was too early morning for anyone to be reached locally!). We called the local manager on his mobile phone and he informed us that there was a second flight scheduled for that very day, even though no such flight appeared on the Departure board in the airport or on DrukAir’s website…..in fact, the transfer desk at BKK informed us that there were NO FLIGHTS from BKK to PARO scheduled to depart later that day…..talk about confusing and upsetting…..after talking with the local manager for DrukAir and he confirmed that there was space available on the later flight and that there was, in fact, going to be a flight we were finally able to arrive PARO about 4 pm and we joined up with our group……everything else went awesome during our Bhutan trip until we got out of bed on the day of our departure from Paro and learned that the itinerary that you had provided to us did not match the times for flight departures to Delhi…the flight that was shown on our itinerary would only have traveled to Katmandu with no onward travel to Delhi….therefore we had to wait for several more hours, having risen from bed at 0400 to depart on the early flight only to have a 1130 actual departure……the plane finally departed from PARO behind schedule about 1 pm and it was supposed to be a PARO to DEL direct flight but because of the plane weight we ended out making an unscheduled refueling flight in KTM for a 20 minute in and out and then we made it to DEL about 4 pm, the captain did apologize for the delay that the refueling caused……this itinerary mix-up on departure times (730 a.m. vs. 1 p.m.) really ruined our day at AGRA because we had planned on evening photos at the Taj but instead we arrived well after dark at 930 p.m. and the lights were all out at the Taj…..therefore we only had the opportunity to have photos at sunrise and mid day at Agra……if these two airline problems had not occurred then we would have had a seamless experience in both Bhutan and India.

I would recommend that you include a customer communication that includes instructions on how to manage the DrukAir tickets through the transfer desk when directly transferring from one airline to Drukair. The rest of our group did not have a problem as they left the airport to a hotel and had to go through the airport ticket counter and had their boarding cards issued at the main ticketing terminal…

I do really appreciate what you did do to make things work out for a very memorable trip to a very magical country……amazing to say the least!

Thanks Ugen for asking for feedback….I thought that you wouldn’t want this on your website but instead directly to you……
Thanks again for the magical trip!