MakeMyTrip Profiteering at Customers Expense?. Review on Makemytrip

I find the interface very comfortable and fast. It is easy to see the fares on various dates and airlines. The one-click booking works like a charm. Till two months back I would have given it five stars. Thanks to my evangelism most of my corporate group uses it as their primary travel agent.

On September 5th, 2013 I tried to make a booking on MakeMyTrip. The site debited my account for Rs. 20, 000 but told me my ticket was not booked due to some technical glitch and that it would refund my money in two working days. It so happened that at that time I did not have enough money in my account to book fresh tickets and just wait for the refund. So I called up MakeMyTrip customer care and asked them to resolve the issue because my trip was urgent and I had no immediate means to make the booking.

Previously, when I had booking failures because my money could not be debited, MakeMyTrip customer care called me and helped me make the booking through IVR and other alternatives and made it a very pleasant experience, so I had complete confidence that they would sort out the problem in good order. If the ticketing issue was due to a sudden increase in price I even offered to pay the difference. However, MakeMytrip told me that if I wanted to book tickets I would have to make a fresh booking and pay the entire amount while the already debited amount could only be refunded through due process a few days later.

I spent a fair amount of time requesting, begging and finally arguing and was moved up the channels to the supervisor who said that he would look into the whole thing and try to resolve it positively and that he would give me a call back in an hour. There was no further response. Two hours later I called up again and went through the same song and dance and I was promised action and a call back within an hour.  Two hours later there was still no response and it was then too late for the flight and I missed a very important meeting, had to do a fair amount of damage control and the echoes of the mess are still around.

I was very upset and I wanted to send out irate, damaging rants about MakeMyTrip right after the fiasco but I cooled off and felt that one error should not be held against almost two years of satisfactory service and just left off.

Today, I just checked my account for the promised refund and found that it had still not made it. I called up customer care again and found out that due to some other technical glitch my refund had not been processed at all and that they were willing to cancel my booking and that my refund would be processed by MakeMyTrip within another 5 working days  and that there would be no 'penalty on the cancellation' at which point I hit the roof.

I was then talking to my colleagues about this and came to know that in the past couple of months, out of the 25 tickets we'd booked on MakeMyTrip, 6 times MakeMyTrip took our money but did not book the ticket. They then took an average of more than 10 days to process the refund. And then the bank took another week or so.

I just did a rough estimate and I wanted to post it here. From our experience we had a failure rate of around 24% or almost 1/4th. Assuming that MakeMyTrip has an average of 200 bookings per day, then this so-called glitch occurs 50 times a day with an average of let's say Rs. 10, 000 per booking. That is Rs. 5, 00, 000 in MakeMyTrip's account each day for free. Keeping the money for 10 days means that they have an extra Rs.50, 00, 000 in their account. The interest that they earn on this money itself would be fairly significant at around Rs.40, 000 per month not to mention having a nice hefty cash balance to show off.

Till I played around with the figures I though it was just plain incompetence and bad design with a measure of utter disregard for the customer thrown in but now I am beginning to wonder if the high rates of failure is planned and this is a part of their business strategy.  In which case, MakeMyTrip would be deliberately profiting from customers' monies under the guise of technical glitches.

I would like the reaction of other customers on this. What has been your ratio of successful to unsuccessful bookings and how long has MakeMyTrip taken to process your refund?