Mumbai airport: International flyers face hours-long wait at immigration – Times of India

MUMBAI: Weekends continue to be the most taxing time for passengers at Mumbai airport. Passengers who arrived on international flights in the early hours of Sunday were met with long queues at the immigration counter.
Airport officials attributed the crowds to festive season and said the wait time to clear immigration was about half-an-hour. Passengers who took to social media to vent their ire, however, said they had to wait for hours.
Omkar Pai, a passenger, posted a video on Twitter at 3.23 am that showed the arrival hall packed with hundreds of passengers waiting in queues to clear immigration. “This is what 5 hours of queues are at the Mumbai airport. Mismanagement at its peak. Do not travel international, I repeat do not travel,” he tweeted.
Airport points to surge in flyers due to festival
The Mumbai airport re sponded on Twitter that immigration counters were congested early Sunday morning due to a surge in passenger traffic following the festive season. It led to temporary delays at the immigration counters, the tweet said.
“Between 1.30 am and 3.45 am, both ar- rival and departure immig- ration counters experien- ced extended queue times of up to 24 minutes,” the air- port tweeted adding that its officers were in continuous communication with the authorities concerned to clear the congestion as qu- ickly as possible while maintaining security proto- cols.
The airport added that senior citizens, mothers with infants and pregnant women were cleared thro- ugh the diplomatic counters.The airport’s defence of festive season peak travel did not go down well on soci- al media.
“It’s not as if it’s for the first time that we are celebrating festivals in In- dia.. You should have learnt lessons from rush on domes- tic side,” tweeted @gvips82. This isn’t the first time that the Mumbai airport has be- en in news during for wee- kend crowding this festive season.
On October 8, which was a Friday, terminal 2 saw horrid scenes with massive crowds at the security coun- ters. Passengers took to so- cial media to post pictures of teeming terminal.