If your flight gets cancelled in Delhi prepare for hell!
This just happened to me last week! My flight (United) from Delhi got cancelled. I had already checked in at the airport and just at my boarding gate when I got to know that the flight has been cancelled due to scheduling issue.
There wasn't anyone at the gate so I decided to ask around where can I get in touch with agents from United to get more information.
The security at the airport led me to the Information booth and I had to wait a while till someone from United finally showed up. They had very little information to share regarding the flight cancellation.
Even though there were 4-5 employees, they weren't aware of the refund policies and also did not share any information regarding flight changes. I was fine that the flight was cancelled, what I was not okay with was I was not told if I could get a flight the next day.
The United Agent told everyone that they needed to deboard everyone and they would need everyone's passports. So I handed them my passport and they were gone for 30+ minutes and after coming back they informed all of us that we need to go to the gate.
Still there was no information shared regarding Flight change, I could see on the app that United had rebooked me for Sunday, which was 48 hours late flight and would cause me to miss my work.
Even though there were flights available within the next few hours, no agent was able to help at the airport with the change.
Then they starting checking passengers one by one again like they did before at the Information booth. I am not sure why they had to check again but it seems that they were not familiar with the process.
Then they called the Immigration/Security Agent and after a while the deboarding finally started where we had to go through the Immigration again.
This whole process took about 3-4 hours since we were notified that the flight was cancelled. At the Delhi airport, you cannot just leave the airport straight away, you have to do the deboarding process which can be very time consuming.
Now I was out of the airport, I couldn't get to see the agents for the flight change. I tried going from one gate to another but the security doesn't let you go in if you don't have the flight on the same day.
I was looking for flights while running around and even lost my passport for a while! Luckily Security had already found it.
While United had arranged coach and hotel, by the time I arrived at the coach, I was told that the coach was full and it would take a while for another one to come.
At this point, I had enough and decided to just head back home and call United directly the next day to change my flights. It took me another 5 hours the next day for them to resolve the booking issues.
Hopefully this never happens to me again.