‘Makemytrip.com spoiled my Kolkata vacation’

I am talking of ‘Make My Trip’, of course, perhaps the country’s foremost travel and tourism portal, which we, the urban gypsies, have come to rely on in order to arrange our lives in constant flux, moving from city to city at the snap of a finger. As of 2 June 2013, I, too, had exactly the same thoughts on the website, flying 24 times to Kolkata from Delhi and back in the past one year, when I was enrolled as a first year student at the Jindal Global Law School. 

I must mention that during this one year, every ticket that I had bought had been via makemytrip.com and I never had a reason to complain. Until the episode on 2 June 2013 that turned the table and left a taste so bitter in my mouth that I am never going to avail their services again.      

I had booked an air ticket with the Indigo airline from makemytrip on 31 March 2013 to travel from Delhi to Kolkata on 2 June 2013. I received online confirmations of the same from the portal and the last one to arrive in my Inbox was dated 31 May 2013. 

However, when I reached the Delhi airport well on time, not only was I told by the person at the Indigo counter that my booking had been cancelled, I was also flummoxed at the unfriendly manner in which they spoke to me. Perplexed, when I dashed to the makemytrip counter to enquire what went wrong, I was told that my ticket was still showing and they had no idea what was the problem. Saddled with a lot of luggage, I had no option but to buy a fresh ticket (the earlier ticket had cost me Rs 4,000, while the new one cost me Rs 18,600) and take another flight to Kolkata. 

Later, when I lodged a written complain to makemytrip, I was unceremoniously told that an ‘unknown server’ had cancelled my ticket from their website, and they weren’t responsible for the action. 

In fact, the icing on the cake came when they, instead of compensating the financial loss that I had accrued, asked me to pay for the even the cancellation charges! It is appalling how the portal changed from a friendly website to a rude and unhelpful entity hell bent on shirking responsibility. 

I urge the government to take note of how lax the security systems of our favourite portals are, even though we feed in personal details into them on a daily basis. Ultimately, the loss is not just monetary, but leaves a terrible impression on vulnerable passengers.