"Without me, no flight" sums up Uzbekistan Airlines customer service

On Monday afternoon what is usually a seamless process, airline travel between neighboring countries, became a series of encounters that left most of us baffled, surprised, confused, and all we could do was eventually laugh at it because all 15 of us on the tour ended up getting boarding passes and getting on an Uzbekistan Airlines flight from Almaty to Tashkent.

It all started when we approached the ticket counter and the agent asked for "paper tickets." I don't know about you but I don't remember the last time I ever saw a paper ticket. Our tour travel leader spoke with a supervisor and it appeared to be all worked out, we checked-in, received boarding passes, and only two members were going to have to pay overweight fees for their carry-on luggage (watch out America, one of our airlines will do this soon, it is a cash cow waiting to happen). But, just when things looked ok that is when everything changed. So, without further adieu, I give you what might be very close to real list of How to Issue Tickets and Boarding Passes from the Uzbekistan Airlines employee handbook:

1. Collect all passports, look through them
2. Return all passports
3. Collect all passports, take them to the Booking Office booth
4. Hand write paper tickets in the Booking Office booth
5. Walk hand written paper tickets and passports to ticketing counters
6. Walk passports with paper tickets inserted in passports back to Booking Office
7. Give paper tickets and passports to 7 of 15 travelers in party
8. Due to time constraints disregard steps 1-7 and just give passports back to remaining travelers and let them go through security and board plane, demonstrating paper ticket writing process was unnecessary and essentially a power play in a very Soviet style

I am not joking, this is exactly what happened. The best part was the women were doing all of the work and the "supervisor" men were doing the walking between the booking booth and ticketing counter. It was one supervisor who told our travel leader that "without me, no flight."

Just in case you didn't believe me, here is the paper tickets they wrote for some travelers:

And, here is a picture of most of the group just sitting in the ticketing area, watching all of this happen:

AND the best part is once we were on the plane, the Uzbekistan Airlines magazine started with this pledge, stating it is a "rapidly progressing company." Ha, apparently the ticketing staff and supervisors have that training later this week because no one has told them yet!


The morale of the story, avoid flying Uzbekistan Airlines or have your paper ticket you didn't reserve ready to go (we had e-tickets but their system said they were paper).

Always one to add on a positive note, before the run-in at the Almaty Airport we did have some time to stroll around Panfilov Park in the middle of the city and see some really cool sites. The first was the Zenkov Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox church built in 1907 and the second tallest wooden building in the world. The whole cathedral was built without nails.



The park built around the cathedral is the largest in central Almaty and was dedicated after World War II to the 28 guardsmen of the Panfilov Division who died defending Moscow from the Germans. This very Soviet WW II monument was at the entrance to the park: