Who ruined my trip?

In this age of e-commerce, the online travel industry has emerged as a huge
potential market. Sites like Makemytrip, Yatra, and TravelmartIndia have gained
in popularity in recent years. In the given scenario, one would expect booking
hotels through travel sites to be quite a smooth sail. At least, that's what
Ronnie Roy and many others thought before they had some unsavory experiences.

Roy' job takes him to places. Though he has always been fond of traveling,
his frequency of travel has gone up in the last couple of months. Unfortunately,
so have his unpleasant experiences of booking budget hotels through popular
travel sites.

Woeful experience

If you get a hotel booking done and finish the stay without a glitch, you
could consider yourself lucky. Shelling out extra bucks at the time of checking
out or checking in; room availability in hotels or the lack of it even after
having made the booking; quality of hotels or security issues at the time of
booking it offline-one wonders if the popular travel sites are giving their
consumers a fair deal?

Roy points out two instances where he ended up paying more than the actual
amount quoted on the popular travel site, Makemytrip.com. Roy was traveling with
a female colleague to Shimla, and was expected to reach after midnight. The
hotel authorities had been informed about this. Although past experiences have
not been too great with travel sites, he was hoping it would be smoother this
time around. “The office had booked two rooms, but to my utter surprise when we
reached Shimla at 12.30 am, we were told only one room was available. Even after
showing the confirmation slip for two rooms, we had to wait for over half an
hour. After such a long and tiring journey, waiting was torturous, to say the
least.” Though Roy finally got the rooms, it came at a higher price.

In another incidence, the invoice for the payment he made online at the time
of booking a hotel in Goa never reached the hotel during the three days he
stayed there. He rues, “It's been three weeks now, and the statement of the
online payment has still not reached the hotel. So I still don't have the bill
from the hotel.” Add to this the quality of the hotel! In the name of 'budget
hotel booking', the basic amenities available really looked on a budget: “Having
an STD line connection was a far cry, the hotel didn't even have a local line
available,” Roy adds.

He was simply appalled. Not only did he face an embarrassing situation in
office, following up with hotel people was too much of an effort, even though he
wasn't really on the wrong side of the fence. Roy wasn't able to submit the
travel statement on time. “It has been sheer harassment for me,” he says, “I
followed up a couple of times, but they haven't got back to me.”

What they say

on being asked what the complaint redressal mechanism is like for handling
such cases, Makemytrip's CEO Deep Kalra says, “It really depends on the nature
of the complaint. If it's got to do with a change in fare, we investigate it,
though it is a rare occurrence. Hotel room bookings is a more serious thing that
we immediately try to sort out, by getting back to the consumer.”

However, Kalra claims that these complaints are “really infrequent, we might
get one in about 4-5 months.” Incidentally, budget hotel booking, which has a
range of Rs 1,500-3,000 rooms, contributes almost 70-75% of hotel bookings on
this popular website.

The online travel industry, in fact, has been driving the growth in the B2C
e-commerce industry. The total market size of the online travel industry in
2006-07 was close to Rs 5,500 crore and in 2007-08 is expected to be Rs 7,000
crore. The total e-commerce industry in India is expected to be Rs 9,210 crore.

Therefore, considering the importance and value of the online travel sector
in the e-commerce firmament, such shocking gaffes can be a serious dampener and
even hurt the industry in the long run.

Even though the market speaks volumes about the potential, there is still a
lot of catching up to be done with some of the other international websites like
Ratestogo.com, says a regular user of travel sites. Roy has also been regularly
booking through Ratestogo for hotels in cities across the globe like Dublin,
Vienna, Paris, London, Zurich, among others but has yet to face problems like
their Indian counterparts.

Interestingly, it is not about any particular travel site, such instances are
plenty with the others as well. It's simply a question of quality of service
offered. It's time Indian travel sites put in faster and more efficient
complaint redressal systems in place at a time when the online travel market is
getting bigger by the day. Or the time may soon come when even domestic
travelers would make their domestic bookings through global sites.

(Names of customers have been changed on request)

Urvashi Kaul

urvashik@cybermedia.co.in