Indian railways allows pets to travel along with the passengers only in First Class and First AC. Else the pets have to be loaded in the brake van along with the rest of the cargo. Bangalore to Kolkata is connected by only one train and it takes 3 days to reach Kolkata plus there was no First Class or First AC on the train.
We could not take the American option of driving there as I don't have any car :-)). That essentially left air as the only medium. With numerous airlines coming up everyday in India catering to all needs, we thought that process would not take long. But when we called up the call centers of most domestic airlines, we were in for a shock.
The only airlines that carry pets are Sahara, Indian Airlines (Indian now) and Jet. Most of the other airline support staff had a tough time even understanding what I meant by traveling with pets. So me and my wife tried calling up all the airlines to get the details.
Essentially there are two ways of booking your pet (any live animal) on a plane - as Excess Baggage or as Cargo. Cargo is a cheaper option but there are hassles involved, you have to book the cargo about 2 hours before the flight and can collect them only an hour after the planes have landed from a different terminal of course. Worse, even though you have paid and have all the necessary certifications (I would talk about them later in the post) you are still not sure that the pets would travel in the same flight as you do. There is a distinct possibility that the plane might be overloaded and the pets would have to travel on another flight only. So the safest and perhaps the costliest option is the Excess Baggage one.
Different airlines have different ways of calculating for a pet. Indian airlines has a standard excess baggage rate for the sector that you are traveling (In my case Bangalore to Kolkata) and they charge you twice the amount + taxes. Jet calculates as about 1.1% per kg of the base ticket cost for excess baggage. Now this seemed cheap earlier but its not - the base ticket price is not the price for which you purchased the ticket but the base price of the ticket as mentioned by the airlines (Essentially this the price that you would have purchased the tickets had there been no competition). The base price is around Rs. 14,000 for a ticket from Bangalore to Kolkata. This made about Rs. 160 per kg + taxes + some fuel charge of Rs 60 (overall, not per kg). Sahara is the cheapest option of Rs 160 per kg of excess baggage and we opted for that.
But wait, thats not all. There are some procedures to be followed.
- The pets need to vaccinated (thanks to my wife, all my pets were).
- You need a certificate from the vet stating that these pets are fit to travel.
- The pets should be kept in an enclosed crate (cage) which should have enough space for the pets to stand and move around freely. My wife had brought crates for them long back for my pets to sleep in and therefore we had no troubles either locating a crate vendor or to get these crates. Please note that some airlines are finicky about metal crates and they don't allow. The vendor told me that Jet used to allow metal crates but no longer does - it requires extremely costly fiber glass crates. The crate weight would be added in the excess baggage weight.
- You need a absorbent material in the base of the crate.
- And finally you need to muzzle and sedate the pet. The sedations are available with most vets and are available as injections or tablets. Injections are much better as they are fool proof. The effect of sedation take about 30 mins. to take effect and last for about 4-5 hours provided the pets are not disturbed.
We chose Sahara as Jet was too fussy and nobody picked up the phone at Indian Airlines :-)). Armed with these, we boarded the flight and have reached Kolkata. My actual traveling experience would take another blog.
This is a repost - it was posted before my blogs were deleted on 02 Feb 2007
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