The whole concept of low-cost airlines in India demands a new form of business where costs are minimized. Hence, over the years, we have seen airlines which are no-frills (such as Deccan, Spicejet, Go, Indogo, etc), with no newspapers and magazines, where no food is served / food has to be bought, and so on. Such airlines have brought the total cost of travelling down tremendously, letting people travel by with cheap tickets rather than the very expensive tickets that had to be bought earlier from full-fare airlines such as Indian Airlines and Jet Airlines would be charging; these full fare airlines would provide a much better level of service, but would also charge a much higher fare, sometimes 3-4 times the fare charged by these low-cost airlines.
However, at the same time, some of the practices that they followed to save money were anti-customer. If a ticket was cancelled, they would not refund the whole amount, or in really bad cases, the airline would give a voucher to travel on a later date but would not actually give the money back; in some cases, the refund would take a really long to come through and only after much follow-up from the traveler. In order to change some of these practices, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has made it binding on airlines to refund the money and not follow a practise of proving a voucher instead. However, airlines have been loath to do, making the DGCA threaten to take action:

Some low cost carriers (LCC) follow a controversial policy of no refunds by insisting that those who cancel their tickets fly again within a certain period of time in lieu of the refund. The DGCA had some months back issued a rule that airlines must give the option of both a refund and future travel to those who cancel tickets in time.
But despite this legal requirement, some LCCs are still not refunding money and asking passengers to travel again within a cutoff period. “We have been receiving such complaints from the public. It’s our constitutional obligation to ensure that laid down rules and regulations are followed,” DGCA chief Kanu Gohain said. The agency is going to seek an explanation from defiant airlines this week by issuing notices to them and threatening stern action if they don’t start following the rule of refund.

Airlines have been protesting this rule, but the fact is that not allowing customers a refund when they have not availed of a service, and used a quite normal procedure of cancellation is a violation of customer service norms, and cannot be allowed just because it works in the airline’s favor. The DGCA should continue to enforce this rule, and customers, if presented a voucher by an airline rather than a refund should protest to the airline, and petition the DGCA, as well as consumer forums. They should also refuse to accept any such voucher, and point out to the airline that this matter will go to a consumer forum.

It happens again and again. A person either has not accepted the credit card that was provided to him even when he had not requested the credit card, or he was charged for some amount where he did not make the transactions. Mistakes can happen, even though in cases of a financial nature, one would expect a much greater deal of carefulness on the part of the bank. However, what really takes the cake is when the bank refuses to come clean, or behaves in a manner that is totally against accepted consumer service behavior:

Paresh Karia (30), the owner of Jeetendra General Store, a grocery shop near Sonapur Lane in Kurla (W), was in for a shock when he received an ABN Amro credit card statement for June showing Rs 44,900 as due. Karia claimed that he never received the credit card. Karia said he approached the bank several times, but they did not reply. The bank allegedly did not even respond to his advocates’ letters. According to him, the bank has even started sending notices and making calls. “In the last two months, I have received over 15 calls from the bank’s recovery department, threatening me and demanding repayment of the dues and the late fees.”
He said, “In April, one of the bank’s telemarketing executive called me, asking me to apply for the bank’s credit card. At first, I refused, but the executive kept calling me, after which, I took the card. In May, the executive took my signature on the form, and took documents like PAN card and my HSBC Bank statement.” After 15 days, Karia received a confirmation call from the bank to verify the documents. However, Karia refused to give the details on phone and asked the executive to come down to his shop. “The next day, I received a parcel from the bank,” said Karia.

From time to time, the RBI and various Consumer forums have asked banks and other financial institutions to behave, and many times charged penalties, but these incidents keep on happening. It will come to a time when courts will actually start hauling executives of the banks before the court, like a court almost did to the ICICI Chief.

This is about a seemingly big fraud that India’s largest private sector bank is playing on its customers, giving a designation for something, and then doing something that is directly opposite, just so that they can squeeze their customers even more.
I used to work in Chennai, and had an ICICI account over there (that was a salary account). Later, I used the same account for linking to the ICICIDirect stock trading facility. Some time later, I switched jobs and cities, and moved over to the capital city, Delhi. While migrating many of my details, I asked the local ICICI bank about what I should do about my existing account, and they informed me that I can use my account as is, except that checks that I issued would involve an additional charge because of the different city status. Okay, so I stopped using the ICICI Bank account for this purpose, and used my alternative salary account instead for check issual.
However, this always was a bit irritating since the stock trading account being ICICI meant that a lot of inflow and outflow would go through the ICICI account, and not being able to use the money for checks meant a small inconvenience. Imagine my pleasure some time later when I learned that ICICI Bank was now issuing payable-at-par checks. I started using these for regular transactions in Delhi, and imagine the shock when I saw a multi-city charge to my account. Upon asking ICICI Bank about this charge, guess what they told me about the ‘payable-at-par’ checks ?
“Multi-city cheque payment charge is a charge for clearing a payable-at-par cheque at an outstation location (i.e. outside your city).”
Further, this is their definition of what payable-at-par means:
“Please note that ‘Payable at par’ means a cheque is payable at any location in India.”
Very strange. So were they claiming that their earlier checks would not get paid if I gave them to somebody in Delhi ? I don’t see what benefit their customers are getting as per their definition of ‘payable-at-par’, it is only ICICI Bank that can claim that they are also issuing payable at par checks, and yet get away with charging a penalty to their users.
I tried using their complaint site at https://infinity.icicibank.co.in/salesEARWeb/web/rbi/jsp/index.jsp, but it built using Javascript, and the complaint option did not work (maybe they do not want to see complaints)

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.