Apr 21, 2007 10:39 AM
4146 Views
(Updated Apr 21, 2007 07:46 PM)
It was last Thursday(19.04.2007) when I was traveling back from Mumbai to Ahmerdabad. I would have taken the Shatabdi Express. But this time I changed my plans and thought of giving a try at Raj National Express. There was two reasons behind the same. One. I would be able to get down at Wide Angle at Satellite which is right next to my home. Second, I had plans to take a package tour with Raj Travels and wished to check the service.
The ticket booking was quite easy with Raj travels as I could easily do that from my laptop using my credit card and did not have to run to their office. Also I could select the seat of my choice. I reached the bus departure site 30 min before the departure of the bus. It’s conveniently located at Kala Nagar(Aaram Hotel) at Bandra. The bus was supposed to start at 8 am. However, it arrived at the stop quite late and finally flagged off at 9 am.
Though the seats were comfortable, the AC panel was broken and reading lights were not working.
Once the bus(MH 04 G 4724) started, an employee of Raj travels announced that the bus wont go inside Baroda and will leave the passengers over the highway, with some weird reason that the bus cant turn around at that place. The passengers were quite upset as they were not informed of this earlier.
The journey went fine until it reached Surat, where the bus was driven to a crowded congested place instead of Highway and the bus got stuck in a terrible congestion. It remained stranded for more than three hours there. The bus finally reached Baroda and to the delight of all the Baroda bound passengers, it went inside the city and dropped them at the designated stop.
It was 10 pm by that time and we were running quite late in the schedule. And then came the nightmare. The authorities at Baroda announced that the bus wont go more as it is late and asked us to vacate the bus immediately.
They started giving stupid excuses like: the driver’s duty is over; the bus suddenly have defects and cant start; the bus doesn’t have permit to enter Ahmedabad(as if we all are stupid bunch of fools). One of the employee said that they may return us the balance amount from Baroda to Ahmedabad and we may arrange for our own transport… I wondered how we would have arranged that at that late night.
After all the passengers agitated against it, they called up Ahmedabad office and asked them to arrange for transport and told us that the bus is coming from Ahmedabad to Baroda to take us there. And that would obviously mean we will have to stand in the road for two long hours till the bus arrives. There was no official around to hear our grievance. They gave us some numbers(0932204403) but the person directed us to another number then to another and we got no acceptable reply. Finally we had to wait till 1.5 hrs and a bus came from Ahmedabad.
We reached Ahmedabad at 1:10 am in the night(instead of the scheduled arrival time of 7:30pm) along with lot of harassments from the journey.
All 18-20 passengers in the bus resolved that we would never ever travel with Raj Travels and also would inform our family and friends about what happened all through the horrible journey…
People who are going to take Raj Travels’ service in future. please think twice before you go for the same.
