Recently, I got a call from my spouse about contact from a travel package company. A company called XS Travel Club had contacted my spouse with grand promises of a great package - for Rs. 5000, you get a 3-4 days 4 nights package at locations varying from Mussorie to Shimla to Goa to Bangkok. Sounds good, right ? But there was more. There was 10 complimentary beauty treatments from the various Delhi outlets of BodyCare (typically things such as facials, massages, hair treatment, etc). And there were 10 dining coupons from 5 restaurants in different places in Delhi. Since I had more experience in handling such kind of things, my wife gave my contact to these people, and they contacted me. I talked on the phone to them, asked about the holiday resorts (the names they took sounded good), and even the restaurants looked fine. So I asked them to come over to my office for showing me the package and taking the Rs. 5000 from me.
They were at my office the next day, and everything was there - the stay vouchers, the dining coupons, and the BodyCare coupons. So I started reading and discovered a few interesting things:
- There was a separate processing charge of Rs. 199 mentioned in the terms and conditions
- For every night, there was an additional charge of Rs. 399 to be paid
- Places like Manali / Mussorie / Shimla did not allow the coupons to be used during the following months (yes, you must have guessed by now - the summer months; so no using of these coupons between April and July)
- so, overall they were going to be charging me Rs. 1400 more if I used the travel package (which is almost 30% additional over the Rs. 5000 they wanted to charge initially)
When I spoke to the person who had contacted me, he spoke to his manager (and I could hear the conversation to some degree). In effect, his manager said that they should tell me to take my vacation in August, and not in summer.
By this time, I was not exactly a cool cucumber, and I gave a piece of my mind to the guy who had spoken to me. In effect, what he had done was deceitful since he had not told me these conditions, and since I had opened the fine print, I came to know, else I would not have known.
He assured me that they would not charge these Rs. 1400, and would change the not allowed period of the package to some other time, but when I asked him to make that in the written terms and conditions, he did not respond.
What could have gone wrong ? Learnings:
- If I had taken the coupons without checking, I would have been stuck with those conditions, and would have been cursing myself for not looking at this more carefully.
- If I take the person’s oral committment about getting the money and period waiver without getting that in a written form, it is not something that would have held up later. After all, the person whom I would have spoken to later may deny any suck knowledge and I would have been stuck.

Thus, be very watchful when you see such offers, and always take the time to do a study.

This scenario is one of the biggest fears that people have when dealing with credit cards, and handing this information off to other parties. You hand this off to a person purporting to come from a bank, and then find that charges are being piled on your credit card, and then have to run around in trying to clear yourself of these extra charges. It can get real frustrating and annoying for people to have to deal with such kind of problems. The normal tendency is to blame the bank for keeping such people on their rolls, for having such a process where misuse can happen, and for then being insensitive to the problems they are facing. Read more about the incident:

The manager of a Delhi-based private firm was arrested along with two accomplices on Friday on charges of allegedly making purchases using the credit card of an ICICI bank customer.
“We registered a case on the complaint of Atri and arrested Goyal from the Rohini branch of ICICI Bank. The other two were arrested at the instance of Goyal. During interrogation it was revealed that Goyal is the manager of i-process, an outsourcing private company of ICICI Bank, dealing with credit card users whereas accused Ashish Katyan and Dev Aggarwal were working as recovery agents in another collection agency,” said DCP (outer) Atul Katiyar. “The accused used to contact the customers and introduce themselves using a fake name. Then they used to send Ashish Katyan for collecting the card from consumers. Instead of blocking the cards, the three used to go shopping.

The basis for the information that these thieves come up with is information that the bank has revealed to them, so the bank should be the one to blame for this. In the process of reducing their costs by outsourcing this service, they have let such a thing happen, and hence need to be penalized. If this was a country with stronger implementation of privacy and data theft laws, the bank would be in serious trouble.

They sound like the answer to all your nightmares while driving. Normally, your car works fine, but consider the case when suddenly your car stops in the middle of the journey, leaving you totally helpless. This could be because of a puncture, could be because some other vehicle hit your car, or could be some other problem that is not yet diagnosed (at least, you don’t have the capabilities of a motor mechanic that you can quickly diagnose the problem). Now, you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and you may not be able to figure out what is wrong with a car; you may not be even in a position that you can change the wheel of the car yourself. In such cases, there are now a number of car distress helplines that promise to help you quickly. Some of these (atleast in the Delhi / NCR region) are FastTrack, Race, Cross-Roads; and before you think that this is an advertising blog for them, this post is to point out a few problems in their functioning.
I have tried out a few of them, and performance has dipped badly in the last few years. Their promise is that they will be there within 30 minutes of filing a complaint; now the most common scenario is that of female family members and friends; if they get a puncture, it is not feasible for some of them to do the actual changing of the tyre. Further, you don’t know where it can happen, and if you have a service where you can get a tire replaced within 30 minutes, that is great.
Now, that was the promise. Unfortunately, the promise is not getting fulfilled. With 2 of these vendors (Race and CrossRoads), I have had a bad experience. In both case, there was a puncture, and a lady was waiting after calling them. They promised 30 minutes, but even 1 hour later, no trace. You call them again, and they were getting rude (Ma’am, they are coming, you need to wait). Finally, after 1.5 hours, we managed to make some local arrangements (the good part was that this happened at a place where it was crowded, so there was no safety issue). However, this is bad customer service - promising something that involved safety and convenience, and then not delivering. I will be very hesitant the next time they ask me for money for this service.
I wonder what the experience of other people with such kind of services has been like ?

In the Indian air travel market, there are a number of low cost carriers (also known as discount airlines) that charge very low fares (or rather, they announce low fares, and then charge extra for fuel surcharge and taxes). If you have booked a ticket, and go through with you flight on the low fare, then you feel happy. However, from time to time, one gets to hear of people who had a bad time or who went through an experience that is not exactly consumer friendly; airlines consider this par for the course since they claim that the fare is low and one should not expect the same experience as one gets in full fare. However, one can expect that food and other such comforts may not be available in discount airlines, but basic consumer handling should be proper. In this case, a customer was told that his ticket had been canceled, and he had to pay extra for a regular ticket. As a result, he filed a complaint in the the consumer forum and got compensation:

NEW DELHI: The state consumer commission has pulled up private airline, Air Deccan, for cancelling the tickets of a passenger, booked six months in advance in a promotional fare scheme, just six days ahead of the departure date. The airline has been fined Rs 50,000 of which Rs 25,000 has been given as compensation to the consumer while the rest has been deposited in the state welfare consumer fund.
The airline had told the passenger that the flights on the Mumbai-Delhi route were not operational between May 1 and May 31, 2007 but contrary to claims, the passenger found out that the flights were not cancelled. As a result, he along with two of his relatives had to fly on a more costly flight that cost him an additional Rs 7,650.

From time to time, we find that airlines have been found to indulge in such customer unfriendly practices, and yet there is a feeling that they don’t care that this experience earns them bad remarks and reviews. Low cost carriers are supposed to do away with frills, but not basic customer experience, else they will keep on earning bad press like this.

REFUND RS 92 CR TO INVESTORS DUPED IN 2005-06 ! if you were cheated during the IPO scam of 2 years back, then you may be in for help and relief.

Thousands of retail investors in the primary market could be in line to be compensated monetarily for losses due to manipulation in the initial public offering (IPO) allotment process of 21 companies two years ago. A Sebi-mandated committee has recommended that individual investors who were short-changed in IPOs between 2003 and 2005 be compensated in monetary terms.
The Justice Wadhwa committee has worked out a compensation of Rs 92 crore for investors who had applied for shares in the retail category in 21 IPOs in 2005-06. This is based on the closing price on the listing day for all these IPOs, which include IDFC, Jet Airways and Suzlon. In essence, investors who lost out in these IPOs should be paid the difference between the offer price and the closing price on the listing day, the committee has said in its report, according to sources. This is reckoned to be the unjust gain made by scamsters who cornered shares meant for individual investors.
Sources said the report has recommended that the first to be compensated should be retail investors who failed to get any allotment, followed by those who were allotted fewer shares than they had applied for. Orders to disgorge ill-gotten gains are common in the US, the world’s largest financial market. Finance Minister P Chidambaram had said last year that he wanted to send out a strong signal to those attempting to defraud investors by compensating them for the losses they had incurred. He had told Sebi to work out a mechanism to ensure this.

Sebi board to scan old records

The Sebi board will now have to consider the Wadhwa committee’s recommendations and then take suitable action. This would mean going back to old records with market intermediaries and identifying thousands of investors, which can be a cumbersome exercise. In almost all 21 IPOs, the shares were listed at a premium to the offer price. The compensation can be paid out by selling securities worth over Rs 140 crore of those operators involved in the IPO scam which have been frozen in their depository accounts based on an order issued by Sebi.
The 2005-06 scam featured a clutch of operators who put in thousands of fictitious applications in several IPOs in the retail category of a small value. After allotment, these operators transferred the shares to another set of players, who in turn transferred them to financiers who had provided the funds for investing in the IPOs. These shares were then sold on the first day of listing, landing them a windfall — the price difference between the IPO price and the listing price. Thousands of bank accounts and demat accounts were opened in the names of fictitious entities, which Sebi investigators unearthed in 2006 after checking over 100 IPOs.
During the probe, it came to light that key operators had cornered shares representing 0.52 % of the total number of shares allotted to the retail investors in the Jet Airways IPO. In the Suzlon offering, 3.74 % of shares were allotted to operators using over 21,000 different accounts while in the NTPC issue, the operators used 12,853 accounts to corner 1.30 % of the total number of shares allotted to investors.
Of the 21 IPOs, the IDFC IPO’s offer price was Rs 34, against which it got listed at Rs 49.9 — a premium of over 46 %. The shares closed on the opening day, at Rs 69.5%. In the case of Yes Bank — the offer price was Rs 45. On listing, it rose to Rs 65, a 44% premium, and closed at Rs 61. Maruti Udyog offered its shares to investors at Rs 125. On listing, it climbed to Rs 158.4, a premium of 27% and closed the day at Rs 164.05. Amar Remedies had an offer price of Rs 28, listed at Rs 50 — a premium of 78%, while for NTPC, the offer price was Rs 62 and the listing price Rs 70 — a premium of 12.9%. It closed at Rs 75.5. TCS had an offer price of Rs 850. It listed at Rs 1,076 — a premium of 27%, and ended the day at Rs 987. Suzlon offered its shares at Rs 570, listed at Rs 640 — a premium of 25 % — and closed at Rs 690. Jet airways offered shares at Rs 1,100, listed at Rs 1,211 — a 10% premium — and closed at Rs 1,305.

Such a measure would be very welcome for investors; most retail investors feel that the market is always manipulated, and that SEBI turns a blind eye to such things. So if SEBI can take a step in this regard, it would be extremely welcome.