I am having a worst flight booking experience with GoIbibo.com. In short we tried to book flight tickets on 26th September late night due to an urgency. One transaction on Goibibo failed and my credit card charged for the amount of Rs 24,654. Due to an emergency we didn’t check that, I realized the credit card charge on 29th September and from that date to till today I am trying to get that charge be reversed from GoIbibo.com.
Now this is what happened. On Sept 26th I booked flight tickets for my Sister family, when I used my Credit Card (CC), the transaction failed, I didn’t get the tickets. So I used another CC and booked the tickets, the second booking was success and got confirmed tickets.
We are attending a family member who had a medical emergency so I didn’t check what happened to the first transaction, I checked this on 29th Sept after coming home. My CC is also charged for the amount of Rs 24,654 for the failed transaction. Immediately I contacted my Bank (ICICI), they informed that the merchant has claimed the money, so I had to contact the merchant regarding the same, and they will reverse the transaction.
I called Goibibo, the customer rep says that systems are under some maintenance and he can’t check the transactions, so I should call after 1 or 2 hours. I called customer care number and followed up, the customer care executive told me to mail travel@goibibo.com as he is not able to find the transaction.
I wrote to them and got the reply on Oct 1st, saying that the first transaction is not successful and I should contact the bank.
I called the bank and they said the money is claimed by the merchant. I have wrote to Goibibo again giving them my bank statement reference.
They have replied back on Oct 6th asking me to send bank statement so that they can investigate further.
I have sent the CC statement. They replied saying that they are forwarding it to the finance team and they need some time to validate the same.
I don’t know what that some time means, a week , a month or a year. I have not heard from them since then. I have sent a reminder on Oct 13th asking for an update on the issue. They didn’t bother to reply at all.
Today before writing this blog post, I have also sent a mail to the management team at Goibibo.com.
This is the worst experience i have ever had while booking the tickets. I have booked on other websites and airline sites but never had any problem. Errors do happen sometime, but how you respond to your customers is what differentiates one service to other. Clearly GoIbibo.com doesn’t seem to care about their customers anyway. I am patiently waiting for their response, all they have to do is respond quickly to their customers queries. Simply putting customer first as their priority on their website doesn’t take you anywhere.
Now my only option seems to be to raise a dispute with the help of my bank or go to consumer court. What do you think?, any suggestions are appreciated.
Any of you who are reading this post had this kind of experience, then please share your experience here in the comments.
Update After writing this post, I was contacted by Goibibio Twitter support. They said they are investigating the matter. But the next day I have got the money back to my account, well magically I would say :).
