Never Goibibo!

15:01 Travel 0 Comments

It was my dream to send my parents for a wonderful trip to the mystical mountains of Kashmir valley. I was planning for quite sometime now and this year seemed to be the right time since I had saved some money for their vacation. In July, I booked flights from New Delhi-Srinagar and back for my parents for the 22nd of Sep'14 and 29th of Sep'14 respectively. The tickets cost INR 8500 as Spicejet and Indigo had announced a monsoon season offer for its customers.  I booked the tickets through Goibibo since it seemed to be the easiest and the most convenient for me instead of going through the different websites of the service providers. I was really very excited and looking forward for their trip in this season. But the things did not turn out that well and God's fury embarked upon the 'heaven on earth' through massive floods in the valley leaving over hundreds dead and lakhs homeless. I discussed the situation with my parents and called goibibo for the cancellation of tickets. To my utter dismay, the cancellation process was very time consuming and moreover the representative on phone was rude to the tees. The worst was not over yet. Although it was a natural calamity due to which I had to cancel the tickets, there was INR 1500 for each passenger and INR 1500 for each leg deducted from the refund leaving only INR 2500. And on top of all this even goibibo deducted their own cancellation charges of INR 1000 and their convenience fee mounting to around INR 500 which only left INR 996 as the refund to be credited back to my account.

Although I happened to cancel the tickets way before the departure, there was no consideration taken either by the aviation companies or the travel agency. My only concern is if railways have the ability to refund the money based on the cancellation dates, why cannot an aviation industry have the same norms? And moreover in special cases the private companies too should be considerate enough for its customers. I will certainly raise this issue with the appropriate authorities of India so that some corrective steps can be taken in putting a stop to these irrational policies. Until then my advise to all of you would be to be careful and prefer travelling through the Indian Railways. At least your hard earned money would not be lost the way mine is.