Their Apology

Shortly after this blog was featured on a popular news site moneylife.in (my heartfelt thanks to them), it started receiving huge amount of attention. Guys at MakeMyTrip.com took notice of the enormous negative publicity that they were getting and one of their senior officers called me up offering their apologies and wrote a post about their customer service here. And then one of the commentators asked me what’s, say on it. Here’s my say:

We did speak to him later and deeply regretted the inconvenience caused to him and offered a full refund for his booking.

When I checked in to the hotel and found about the situation, I tried calling them through my cellphone going through the “existing booking” route and no matter what, I couldn’t connect to them. I was just put on hold. When I was on the verge of depleting my cellphone currency, I called their call center again and took the “new booking” option and immediately I got through them! Their response was a typical call center type – We are really very sorry. We will issue you a refund in 7 days.

They then called me up in the evening to let me know that they have processed the refund, and there was definitely no deep regret on their part. Now I don’t know why they are glorifying the refund issue so much. If they hadn’t offered me (and others who have gone through such ordeal) a refund, they wouldn’t have existed here. They would have been in jail. So don’t glorify the refund issue. It’s a common practice and they have not done anything out of this world.

Thereafter, in January this year, we reconnected with Mr. Rao after coming across his blog. Once again, we relooked at all details at our end and as a service gesture, offered him a travel voucher to give us a second chance. He said he would not be using the travel voucher “as of now” and would continue keeping an eye on all review sites and till he was satisfied, he might “use the voucher and close his site”.

Why so late? Just because my blog started getting attention? They just threw a cheap bait at me hoping if it would change my mind. When the MMT guy came up with this offer, I had told him that if this would have happened in US, you guys could have been sued for Lakhs.

And now again, in April, and being a peak season for travel business, suddenly when this blog started getting extra attention, they again woke up?

This is not customer service, this is safeguarding your interests in disguise of customer service.

When the MMT officer called me up today and offered his apologies, I told him, if you had called me up earlier, things would have been different. It’s too late now. Your customer service certainly has not delighted me.

And let me reiterate this. Once this frenzy dies off, I won’t hear from then again, until some other news site picks up my blog.