Did not want to fly Air India as I have read some negative reviews about meals, lounges and customer service.
FYI data point: We flew Air India SIN-DEL-FCO on Lifemiles tickets last month and I'd do it again.
Hard product was good; their lay-flat seat was particularly good for foot-room.
IFE was better than I expected; screen and controls good, content not SIA or CX variety but I found that there was plenty for two long-hauls worth of recent release English language movies and a few episodes of a few popular TV shows.
Food was ok; Quite veg-o focussed, two ethnic dishes and two western dishes on offer for mains. Curries quite good.
Service was hit and miss; SIN-DEL our FA was possibly the best FA I've ever come across, nothing was too much trouble, he was extremely pleasant and helpful and seemed to genuinely care about us having the best possible flight of our lives. DEL-FCO was a completely different story, FA's just going through the motions and wouldn't even give anyone a doona to sleep under for the evening flight even though they were stacked up in the locker above me. No, here's just another flimsy day blanket from an empty seat nearby. (previous flight was a day flight but delightful FA was insistent on setting us both up with full doona and big pillows after finding out we'd been awake all night).
Lounge; I truly don't know why anyone would complain about the DEL lounge. Again I was expecting the worst but it was perfectly fine. Lots of comfortable chairs, good wifi, small selection of food and a bartender, pleasant ambience compared to the rest of the airport.
From my experience I would rate Air India on par with Thai when comparing their B787 lay-flat offering, service, food and lounges. There are better top-tier airlines of course, but I wouldn't avoid travel on them.
The only issue we had with them was we were through-ticketed from PER on SIA boarding passes, and when we arrived in DEL we needed to have them changed to AI boarding passes. Only they didn't tell us that's what was going on, we just got turned around before security and sent to an extremely chaotic transfer desk where they took our SIA boarding passes, said there was a problem and that we should go and sit down and wait, and a bunch of staff stood around the computer talking very quickly and looking concerned. Then about 20mins later they gave us new boarding passes and waved us through without a word. From what I could gather they were just all dealing with 10 different things at once and the new girl couldn't get the printer to work. But it got the adrenaline going.
