Bangalore Airport

You will probably be greeted by several porters who will get the luggage out of your car and take in up to check-in for you. There is nothing to do at this airport. It is basically check-in security (which opens at 5am) and then you are in the departure lounge. There is a small duty free shop (with a reasonable selection of alcohol and cigarettes and prices in US$) and one or two souvenir shops in the departure lounge but that's just about it. There is also a (yellow) mobile charging box on the wall to the left of the actual gate. A small coffee shop (Coffee Day) serves coffee soft drinks and snacks. The coffee is very good - quite strong but very nice and great at 5.30 in the morning. There were additional outlets but they were not open when I was there. Snacks were not that great but there were sandwiches cookies and a variety of cakes. The boarding process was laborious. There was one guard who checks your boarding pass and that you have stamped hand baggage (you have to attach a luggage tag to your hand baggage and this gets stamped when you go through security/xray screening) receipts. You then go through secondary screening (random) and tertiary screening (also random) followed by boarding pass processing and finally you get on the plane! Make sure you have mosquito repellant available as there are mosquitos in the check-in area. They also hang around in the departure hall but the fans in there are quite powerful and blow them away. But if you get bitten by them I'd spray or put lotion on before you arrive.

Travelled through Bangalore airport twice on domestic flights recently. It's not a world-class airport but both times (around noon) it was not crowded arrival and check-in was quick and efficient and staff helpful and polite. The terminal building is quite old and small but not as dirty as Delhi and some infrastructure improvements would make a big difference.

One could be forgiven for not realising that one is at the airport of what is trumpeted as India’s IT capital. Checking in with any airline using Air India’s computer terminals at BLR passengers can forget about obtaining boarding passes to their final destination if their trip involves a transfer at an intermediate point – the system cannot handle anything but the leg departing from Bangalore. The immigration desks have no scanners for swiping machine-readable passports. However there is uniformed personnel in abundance – some of them doing nothing else but checking whether their counterpart a few yards away has placed a stamp in your documents. Where they are really needed these officers do nothing. Boarding a TG flight on 7th August the procedure was a disaster. Instead of providing the announced priority to families with children and those needing special assistance (and then allowing business class passengers on first) the uniformed guard at the gate was happily (yet again) checking for the numerous stamps on boarding passes of anyone who was rude enough to push their way through (and such people are in abundance in India let me tell you). On the infrastructure side matters have deteriorated even further. Last week I witnessed the collapse of a new structure designed to hide the aircon ducts in the domestic terminal burying the Kingfisher check in desk and one of their agents under the debris. At the international departures building buying a visitor’s ticket has become a farce as passengers and visitors are now separated at the front door and have to use separate escalators. And judging by the state of the seats in the international departures lounge I wonder whether the stray dogs that are omnipresent on the apron area are allowed to use the seats during quite periods – it is simply unimaginable that humans could soil cushions to that extent – and even more so that no one seems to realize they need cleaning.