Just when I thourght I knew all about going via Mumbai, at the weekend my 4th trip in just over a year had some surprises.

There were six of us travelling BA Heathrow- Mumbai then Jet Mumbai - Dabolim. Outward was as expected from previous trips, again it took quite some time to transfer between terminals at Mumbai.

Two of our party had to be back home two days earlier than the rest, so they were booked to come back on thursday. Before leaving us they checked in on-line for the BA segment to get prefered seats. They, like the rest of us, had separate e-tickets for the two flights, so I was interested to hear how they got on. At Dabolim they were allowed to check their baggage through, but in Mumbai they were required to identify their baggage at the BA check-in, which they described as quite a performance. The Jet Airways website does say that this should happen, but says it is done at the Domestic Terminal, and on three previous trips this had never happened to me.

The remaining four of us set off home on saturday. As the other two had no problems checking through I was quite confident. We checked in online with BA just like the others had done and managed to move all four of us to get seats together. But at Dabolim the Jet Airways check-in refused to through check the baggage saying that because we had checked in online it could not be done. I asked why two people doing the same two days earlier had been able to do it and we couldn't. He just repeated that it is not possible. This gave us a problem, we were counting on through checked baggage in order to take a day trip into Mumbai and had booked an earlier flight out of Dabolim to allow time for this. We asked at both Dabolim and Mumbai Domestic if there was a left luggage facility in Mumbai but got no straight answers. So we took the bus to the International Terminal resigned to sitting there with our bags for 10 hours. At the International I went off to see if I could find a left luggage place. Nothing found at the Departures level so I found some stairs to the Arrivals and found a Left Luggage office in a separate building in the car park/taxi rank outside across from the door from Arrivals. Luckily it was open 24hours, so we then set off for a slightly shorter than planned train trip to the City.

A friend travelling outward a week later was booked Virgin then Jet, but the Virgin flight was late and she missed the last plane of the day out of Mumbai. She had to stay overnight and was only wait-listed for the 06:30 flight which ended up being full. She eventually got the 12:00 flight out.

The lessons the tales are...
No matter how well you may understand the procedures they do seem to change, even day to day.
Travelling outward on the Virgin flight involves a tight connection in Mumbai and any delay will miss the connection.

Geoff