For the most part, this review addresses Continental’s NonStop service in economy
a) Newark(EWR) - Delhi(DEL); traveled in 2006.
b) EWR - Mumbai(BOM) round trip; traveled three months ago.
*The Mostly Conventional
*PLUS
1) Price - The fare was just under$1000 for EWR-DEL-EWR, certainly the cheapest at that time due to the flight being newly introduced. And roughly$1150 for EWR-BOM-EWR, with Air India’s one-stop EWR-CDG-BOM flight being just a little cheaper. Both tickets were directly booked at Continental’s web-site. Doing a little more research for the future; I found that Air India & Delta NonStops from JFK were also roughly the same price as Continental, and Jet Airways one-stop(EWR-Brussels-BOM) was roughly$350 more expensive(for non-peak, Christmas-New Year all airlines were roughly$2000).
2) Schedule - Flights leave EWR around 8 - 9 pm, and reach India the next night around 9 pm. Hence one can reach home at a reasonable hour and travel or go to work the next day. Flights leave DEL/BOM around 10 - 11 pm and reach EWR around 6 am, one can usually go to work the same day. Jet lag effects were lesser than the normal one-Europe-stop flights, and flying times were lesser as well(appx. 13-14 hrs USA-India, and appx. 14-15 hrs. India-USA.). Also, in my case EWR being a home airport is much more convenient than JFK.
3) Punctuality - All 4 flights were on time
4) Aircraft - Fairly new Boeing 777’s.
*COMPETITIVE
1) Baggage Limits - 2 free checked-in bags of 50 lbs each.
2) Baggage Handling - Checked in bags were never lost and always arrived promptly at all 3 airports.
3) IFE - All 4 flights had individual TV monitors, and BOM-EWR had AVOD. Headphones were free, and the system was reliable.
4) Seating - Standard economy partially reclining, with each seat getting its own pillow & blanket.
5) Food - Indian Vegetarian a default option in economy on EWR-BOM-EWR, and I do not remember EWR-DEL-EWR. For my part I would say that food quality is inversely proportional to distance above land, not as good as can be found on land and certainly better than what is served in space to astronauts. I personally think that most airline food is indistinguishable from one another(most of them use the same caterer at the same airport.)
ADEQUATE
(but could use improvement)
1) Check-In Counter - Counter at DEL a little chaotic and constrained(Due to a delayed BOM-DEL flight, I arrived with only about 1.5-2 hr prior to departure). They allowed me to check-in at the Biz Class counter upon producing a Frequent Flier Card(just basic & not elite). Checkin at BOM and EWR was fairly smooth, however I reached the counter at least 3 hrs prior to departure. Since all 4 flights were full, one can safely assume that coming early helps a lot.
2) On-Board Service - On customer satisfaction, US Airlines were recently ranked on par with the Internal Revenue Service(US Income Tax Dept.), with Southwest & Continental being the top two. There were many reasons for this low ranking, and on-board service was one of them. On these two flights, I found the flight attendants to be reasonably professional.
The Slightly Un-Conventional
I started reading on-line blogs a long time ago, before there were such things as graphical internet browsers; and a newsgroup soc.culture.India had the 2nd highest amount of traffic. When discussing say "Are Women ill treated in India"; one participant would say "My one aunt in India was really badly treated and hence I think women are ill-treated in India". As a rebuttal, another would say "I have three aunts in India and none were ever ill treated". The only thing one could conclude from such an exchange is that readers of that blog were being ill treated.
I looked over my own conventional review and found some of my reasoning was along the one-aunt/three-aunt style, particularly in punctuality, aircraft age & seating. I have deduced that Continental(on the EWR - India leg) was punctual on the basis of 4 flights in the last 2+ years. Someone else using 4 other data points could conclude the exact opposite. So I went looking for and found sites that measured flight performance, and found a https://flightstats.com(a private site) and https://transtat.bts.gov(a US Govt. site). I present a brief summary:-
a) CO EWR-BOM 45% OnTime with 55 Min/227 Min avg/max delay.
b) CO BOM-EWR 69% OnTime with 127 Min/931 Min avg/max delay.
c) CO all flights 75% OnTime
d) Air India JFK-BOM 72% OnTime with 25 Min/70 Min avg/max delay
e) Air India BOM-JFK 83% OnTime with 27 Min/88 Min avg/max delay
f) Air India all flights 65% OnTime.
g) Jet Airways all flights 52% OnTime
h) Kingfisher all flights 59% OnTime
Also, I found that the on time performance of the New York TRACON airports(JFK, LGA, EWR) was amongst the worst in the USA.
This data can be debated on many points such as reliability(do not really know for Intl, but US domestic should be reliable.), sampling interval(just the past 1 - 2 months.), effect of airports and weather and congestion etc. One thing is certain, I cannot place punctuality as a PLUS for Continental’s EWR-India NonStops; I shall downgrade it to ADEQUATE.
"Fairly New" Boeing 777’s was how I had characterized Continentals fleet; but https://fleetstats.net estimates the avg. age of CO’s 777’s to be 8.1 yrs. Now it could be that those allocated to the India leg may be newer; but on the whole I shall downgrade Aircraft to COMPETITIVE. Research from https://seatguru.com also shows that seating on CO’s 777’s should also be downgraded to ADEQUATE.
Is there anything that can actually be improved after some research? Paradoxically it may be On-Board Service. A U.S. Dept. of labor site states clearly - "Although the primary job of the flight attendants is to ensure that security and safety regulations are followed, attendants also try to make flights comfortable and enjoyable for passengers.". Other sites are more emphatic about safety being a flight attendants overriding responsibility and in-flight food & beverage servicing as secondary. The issue still remains that I do not know how to measure a flight attendant’s capability in ensuring safety. Certainly they ran through the security demos quite competently, and stopped serving food & beverages during sustained turbulence; but I believe that all passengers will benefit from a un-biased analysis. Meanwhile I will upgrade on-Board service to COMPETITIVE, at least with respect to other US airlines.
Overall, I suppose I would recommend this airline on the NonStop EWR-India sector.
Other References
a) https://bls.gov/oco/ocos171.htm
b) https://bloomberg.com