May 19, 2012 03:27 PM
7670 Views
I & my spouse decided to travel on Konduskar/Gogte travels bus from Pune to Bangalore on May 1, 2012 because it offered Volvo A/C sleeper service. At the time the only thing which I thought could go wrong was that the bus would take a couple of hours more than scheduled to reach Bangalore.
The bus left Pune around 6pm - about 15 mins late. It stopped for dinner on NH-4 somewhere before Kolhapur. The restaurant was very average and the bus was running A/C but it was very uncomfortable because the bus was definitely not designed to handle A/C running at full throttle. Somehow after sunset we could manage to catch some breath and slept for a few hours. Around 3am I realized that the bus was not moving. I got down only to realize that their was major engine failure. Slowly everyone started getting up and we realized that we were on the outskirts of Hubli and that the bus need major repairs. After futile attempts of both the drivers to get in touch with owners/managers in Kolhapur they decided to drive the bus to VRL travels HQ which was 12 km away. It was 7am in the morning and all the passengers were allowed to have breakfast in VRL drivers canteen.
All of us were told that the bus would be ready in 1.5 hours. Slowly we started getting suspicious and asked the driver about lack of progress. While one of them was trying his best to keep everyone calm other driver was hiding half a kilometer away to avoid passengers. All our efforts to get in touch with Konduskar management in Kolhapur failed. We were given lame excuses like "Mr. Patil is busy with his puja" while all of us were roasting outside VRL HQ on the road for 6 hours.
Finally after wasting a total of 9 hours bus was repaired thanks to courtesy of VRL travels and we left for Bangalore. After a brief stop at yet another horrible restaurant along the way for lunch we reached Bangalore around 7pm - full 9-10 hours late. Till date no one from Konduskar has every called me or any other passenger, there was no explanation given for why another replacement bus was not sent from Kolhapur even though its not that far from Hubli. I would like to warn people not to travel with Konduskar. They have zero customer service and no sense of pity for passenger comfort.
I pray to god Konduskar/Gogte travels goes to hell!
