Coming back to square one never felt as good (or stupid)

Another day, another lesson. I had booked round-trip air tickets for a three-day trip from Delhi to Mumbai. The entire process of choosing an airline and suitable dates and timings, and making the payments went quite well and I did not realise the blunder that had happened until I received a confirmation SMS within a couple of minutes. It was a ‘how is it possible’ moment for me. The message showed that the date of return flight was a month later than the date of going. Did I choose the wrong date? I am still not sure. It was either an oversight or a software/application error on the booking agent’s website, which was Cleartrip.com in this case.

Realising the error, I called Cleartrip customer care within five minutes, only to learn from the executive that they would not be able to reschedule the flight to the right date or cancel the same without me paying either the amendment fee (about Rs 5,000 per ticket; I had booked three) or the cancellation charges (over 70 per cent of the paid total). That was something I was not aware of. After a long hold, call transfers to various junior and senior executives of three different department — bookings, cancellations and amendments — I was given the hope that they would get in touch with Vistara (the airline in this case) and work out some rebate/discount for the said amendment, but I would have to wait until the next day. Interestingly, the senior executive admitted that choosing wrong dates was a common mistake that people made and that they ended up paying the amendment amount (which is almost equivalent to the fare for a one-way trip to the booked destination).

Well, I waited in hope the whole of next day for the promised call, which never did come. Frustrated, when I called back, repeated the entire story to another executive, I was told that the fare prices had gone up and, therefore, the amendment price too – up from Rs 15,000 to Rs 30,000. If I paid the same, I could get the return tickets rescheduled. Asked if they had contacted the airline, I was told that they tried but there was no response. What that meant was I must stick to the policy of the airline and pay the fair difference, amendment charges, additional taxes and their additional fee for rescheduling, etc.

Well, to borrow from a famous expression, hell hath no fury like a customer scorned. After spending over six hours of my work time and publically raising the issue on Twitter handles of Vistara and Cleartrip, the amount was reduced to the actual amendment charge (Rs 15,000). So, in effect, I ended up paying the additional amount without actually knowing if I really made the mistake of choosing the wrong date—still wondering how that happened. (I wonder what will a poor man without having the capacity to pay the amendment charge do.) Not just that, if I had known I would end up paying the same additional amount that was asked of me in the first place to make good the initial mix-up, I would have spared myself the inanity of the interactions that followed and just paid. (I suppose I needed to feel good about going from 15,000 to 30,000 to back to 15,000—you see, the joke is squarely on us.)

In almost every transaction that one makes online, be it buying a service, a financial product or any other commodity, one gets a window of at least a day to cancel, return, exchange, amend... then why is such a policy not applicable to air tickets? I am surely going to find out the same at some point. I will formally write to the ministry of civil aviation as well as the ministry of consumer affairs, with the suggestion of putting in place guidelines to protect the rights of consumers who book tickets online and make such human errors. One of the customer care executives did admit (I have the recording) that what I did was one of the common mistakes that people made.

In the meantime, you please triple-check your booking dates and also get your friends and acquaintances to do the same before making a final payment.