Mar 23, 2016 03:48 AM
11801 Views
I would like to alert tourists in India, especially NRIs, to a very disturbing extortion scam.
I had booked two rooms in Hotel Bansi in Dwarka, Gujarat, for two nights in January 2016. The booking was done online on December 24th through Arun Singh of indiahotelsroom.com who collected the full total payment in advance into their ICICI Bank account in Delhi before confirming the booking in my name.
Hotel Bansi check-in was straightforward after I provided my USA passport as ID. On the second night I was told by the lobby manager that indiahotelsroom.com had paid Hotel Bansi only half of the charges and had asked them to collect the rest from me in person. We held our ground that we had made full payment to them and had proof of a successful online transaction details showing Hotel Bansi as the Merchant Reference. They said we might have paid indiahotelsroom.com but Hotel Bansi had not received the full payment. They asked us to put them in contact with Arun Singh. Our repeated attempts to call the landline number and mobile number listed by Arun Singh in his email went unanswered.
The next morning Hotel Bansi said they would not allow us to check out unless we made the payment. I said we will not make any payments since we had paid the full charges in advance. When I went to return the room key to the front desk, the owner of the hotel was called on telephone. He threatened to file FIR against me if we left without paying and he said we would not be allowed to leave Dwarka. I told him he could take any legal action available to him since I was sure of being in the right. We left subsequently and did not hear from Hotel Bansi thereafter.
After returning to Bombay I made several attempts to contact indiahotelsroom.com by telephone. The mobile number listed under Arun Singh was never answered. The landline number was answered by Neha, who, after getting all details from me said they had paid Hotel Bansi in full. However my requests that they provide me those transaction details and that I would like a call back from Arun Singh were not complied with. A few days later my telephone attempt was answered by Priti who claimed that Arun Singh was out and she would ask him to call me back. This promise was also not kept.
This leaves me to strongly suspect that indiahotelsroom.com might be a partner in crime with Hotel Bansi and perhaps other hotels in this kind of extortion scam which tries squeeze unsuspecting NRI tourists and pilgrims for some easy money. Most NRI tourists might cringe at the word FIR and might just take the easy route of coughing up the extortion rather than face the hassles at checkout. Such scams will certainly give a new dimension to the adjective “incredible” in the slogan used to promote tourism in India.
I have sent this narrative to a number of regulatory and government entities in Gujarat state and in the central government in Delhi. They might have taken some investigative steps regarding this scam attempt but I am yet to receive a word from them. Meanwhile I hope my posting will serve as a caution to avoid online hotel booking agencies of unknown reputation and to carry ample proof of advance payments and other details even when well known agencies are involved.
