Antilog Vacations - Review ( Mauritius). Review on Antilogvacations

Had an absolute hellish experience with Antilog vacations. This is my Antilog vacations review to help you stay away from these guys. Antilog offers a number of packages through Andaman, Mauritius, Maldives, Kashmir etc. They are based out of Chandigarh, Panchkula. I would advise you to directly go to their office if you want to make any bookings, don't do anything online.

Their modus operandi seems to be: offer incredibly attractive offers, collect an advance from the customer, book much cheaper options, when customer finds out and complains, basically force customer to continue with cheaper option or force customer to leave holding on to their advance. Sometimes customers only find out while traveling

Short version of my Ordeal

1. Paid 10k in advance for hotel package to Mauritius(Honeymoon trip)

   
   




2. Paid 65k for flight tickets to Mauritius for 2 Pax(me and wife)

   
   




3. Flight booking made with 40% of the letters in my name missing - on Air Mauritius

   
   




4. Unwilling to fix my name - Air Mauritius told us the agent can change the name, no one else

   
   




5. Says they cannot fix name but they are booking another flight for me on Air India codeshare flight to Mauritius

   
   




6. Wife on Air mauritius booking and my flight on Air India codeshare with Air Mauritius

   
   




7. My first name nad last name interchanged on Air India Flight

   
   




8. One week later, Air India flight ticket cancelled and blamed me(passenger) for cancellation

   
   




9. Air India officials say the ticket was cancelled by Agency only - no one else can cancel

   
   




10. I ask for refund of flight tickets

    
    




11. They say, they can only pay for one cancelled ticket as the other ticket is correct

    
    




12. They finally agree to refund but with a cancellation fee of 2k because I "asked" for cancellation

    
    

I finally get the refund of flight tickets and dont even bother about the 12k that has already been paid. In addition, I lost another 20k thanks to higher flight costs by the time this entire episode played out. Serves me right to go with such shady operators like Antilog.

Note: I have all emails documented and saved. I also have a number of phone conversations recorded, since I realized that they were fairly dubious. I can share all of this if necessary.

Why do I feel they are an organization that is almost illegitimate and regularly cheat customers:

1. They dont give any personal numbers to talk to. You can only call their office numbers and it is completely at their discretion when they want to respond. Almost every call Ive made only resulted in a call after 3-4 calls.

   
   




2. All their email addresses are customeragent01@antilogvacations.com 02.03 etc

   
   

There is no single person who takes ownership for your order.

1. Most positive reviews seem to be fake(in my opinion). I list the reasons out: A click on previous reviews of such reviewers are typically one single reviews with reviewers having no other social presence online.

   
   




2. In addition, the content on these reviews seem highly suspect, when was the last time someone you actually know, wrote a review for a hotel and instead praised the tour operator who made the booking. Most reviews seem to say "Wow - great holiday by antilog when all they had to do was the booking". It doesnt add up.

   
   

Their Search engine optimization(SEO) is good, so you see a bunch of "Wow Antilog is great messages" when you search for antilog.

1. You can find multiple reviews of real people who have gone through extremely poor experiences with Antilog vacations. Each of them is not a one off, incident which went wrong. It is a series of repeated activities carefully executed to make it a truly hellish experience.

Below is a detailed listing of my ordeal with Antilog.

1. Paid advance on a great hotel price

Paid an advance amount(about 200 USD) for a honeymoon package to Mauritius(was super clear about the hotel, room and dates that I wanted to be there). I was told to pay 25% of total booking amount after I confirm the booking. They sent me an acknowledgement of hotel rooms blocked, I even verified this with the hotel directly. In spite of many poor reviews about these guys, I decided to go ahead on account of the awesome rates that they offer.

Paid for the flight tickets which was cheaper than normal:

I hadn't asked for flights initially but when I enquired later, they were willing to go about 10k Rs. lower than the cheapest flights(flight costs elsewhere were 70k or so), so I thought'wow, must avail this discount'. I went ahead and booked the flight through them. Sent the payments for the flight. This is where the nightmare began.

Booked flights with half the name missing in ticket

Ayesha asked for names of passengers. I sent her the names via mail(along with copies of the passport). The flight tickets were booked in incorrect names. Inspite of explicitly sending exact names, the flight tickets had my first name missing 4 letters and my last name missing 12 letters. I was sure no one would issue a boarding pass with such a large miss. We spent almost 1 month going back and forth with over 30-40 mails and calls for them to fix it. During this time, I even received a call from Air Mauritius(through antilog) who told me that it is possible to make this change but it has to be initiated by the booking agent(Antilog), meanwhile Antilog(through Ayesha and a gentleman named Abhinav) told me that it is upto the Air Mauritius to make the change.

Booked me on a different booking(air india) and booked my wife on seperate booking(air mauritius)(we were on our honeymoon)

After losing my mind on this and calling everyone from their CEO to loads of other people within the org, I was finally told that they are booking another flight ticket only for me(not for my wife) through Air India on code share with Air Mauritius and they will let my wifes ticket remain on the previous air maurtius booking. This pissed me off like crazy. They basically booked 2 different tickets for me and my wife for our HONEYMOON trip! Given Air India's reputation and codeshare dynamics, if anything was to change, me and my wife would have to travel separately for our Honeymoon. I had multiple conversations with Abhinav sharma and it was like Mr. Abhinav and Antilog were doing us a favor and were fairly rude through all this process. Some of the conversations ended up with mr. Abhinav disconnecting the call on me or saying this is all we can do. I was even given numbers of people who were supposedly "Senior VPs" in the org who would personally look into it. Checking on their linkedin profiles revealed they were merely managers. I was stuck, I had my money locked in(About 75k Rs: 10k rs as an advance for my hotel bookings and about 65k Rs. for my flight bookings). The only option I had was to accept this weird situation where I had 1 different ticket for myself(via Air india) to Mauritius and another different ticket via Air mauritius for my wife. The flights were Code Share on the same flight, so I just prayed that nothing would go wrong and went ahead.

Btw, Guess what, even on this booking on Air India, they got my first name and last name mixed up!

By this time, I had gotten used to their incompetency and was more concerned about both me and wife being on the same flight. As I said, I was held ransom with these 2 tickets and I was basically forced to go ahead with these flight tickets.

Air India Ticket cancelled without intimation: Here is the kicker though. A week after they booked the ticket, I just checked up on the flight ticket status on Air India site and it said "Cancelled" . WTF! After all the mega messes, someone had cancelled the flight ticket. When I called up their office, Ayesha first apologized and said she will check up. Followed by a conversation with Mr. Abhinav, who was rapidly turning into the "Bad cop" who has to deal with painful customers. He basically insinuated that I cancelled the flight without telling them. He s