A yatra using Yatra

Why do sites like Yatra.com exists?

I would not be wrong if I say to make the hassle of booking flight tickets easy.

But a recent experience made me wonder whether the above statement hold true anymore or not. Recently I had booked a ticket on yatra.com and the site did everything it is supposed to do except the part where it is supposed to book the actual flight ticket. Yes, they made me login to their site, took the money, send me confirmation email, followed by an e-ticket, but in reality it was all useless as they had not booked the ticket with the airline. So when I reached the airport with the printout of the e-ticket they sent me, I found out it the hard way that the ticket is not booked. When I called their customer care center asking for clarification. They told me that there is nothing they can do right away and I have to buy the tickets again, that too at the last minute price. They also promised to me that I would be refunded the whole amount and I need not worry about a thing .

Some would think that my problems had ended by after that, but in reality they had just started. The refund did not came within reasonable amount of time so I started calling up their customer care at regular intervals. This resulted in partial success as I was given a partial refund of what I was promised after more than 20 days.

After this things started becoming worse. Earlier each of my call to their customer care center had taken about 30-45 minutes of explaining and shouting to get my message across. But after getting the partial refund my each of my calls started taking over one hour, if it was picked. I had faced situations when after talking to the agent for an hour, the agent asked me to hold for a while to get more info and after waiting for about 15-20 minutes, simply disconnected the line, and several times it happened that the phone was not picked up even after ringing for over 15-20 minutes.

Eventually, one of the agent finally acknowledged that they do not have the authority to clear such transactions and only a supervisor can do so. And I tried to get in touch with a supervisor on multiple times of multiple days but with no success. Every time either he was not present or busy in meetings or for some other reason, not able to talk to me. After much persuasion and shouting I was finally able to get name and email id of an supervisor, till then I didnt had any name either and I was trying to get any supervisor present in their office that I could find. Now I wrote an email to this particular guy explaining my situation and all I got from him after four days was that they have processed the refund and money had been transferred into my account. By this he meant that partial refund that I got, even though I had clearly explained to him that I did get a partial refund and I am looking for the rest of it.

So after 49 days of being assured of refund and over 80 days of yatra.com's goof up, I am still short by thousands of rupees for no fault of mine.

Meanwhile I had also talked with the concerned airline staff explaining my situation and asked how one can avoid it in future, they told me that we can call up the airline help line and ask them whether our ticket is valid or not. But I think that if every passenger started calling up the airline helpline then they will have a huge problem in their hands.

In this whole incident what hurt me the most was the customer unfriendly nature of yatra.com. I myself am a computer engineer and know that sometimes issues can happen with the program, but in such cases the company could atleast make sure that the customers do not have to pay through their nose because of the faulty code.