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Problem with Make My Trip – Never user their bus booking service

A few days ago I booked a bus ticket through makemytrip.com.

The bus not only did not stop at the boarding point but also makemytrip.com has one of the worst services I have ever had.

Following is my email to their customer support to which they have not even bothered to reply till now.
I am planning to take a severe legal action against them in case they do not respond properly soon.

Gmail Krishna Reddy 

Please Cancel & do the needful – Re: Your MakeMyTrip bus e-ticket for booking id:BUS50009116874053 (Hyderabad-Anaparthi)


Krishna Reddy Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:08 PM


Hello,

I have booked a bus ticket (Make My Trip Id: BUS50009116874053) through your portal makemytrip.com.
The journey was from Hyderabad to Anaparthi and boarding time was 10:40 pm at Panjagutta in Hyderabad.
Other ticket details can be found in your email below.

However, the bus did not stop at the designated boarding point mentioned in the ticket.
The bus passed by the boarding point but did not even slow down there, let alone halting.
This despite my being present at the boarding point much before the boarding time and waving at the bus when it was passing through the boarding point.

Then I consistently kept calling up all five contact numbers of the bus operator (model travels) mentioned in the ticket.
There was no response at all from 4 of the five numbers you have mentioned in the ticket.
Upon calling the fifth number, I was given another phone number and was asked to call that number.
This sixth number happened to be a wrong number.

Then I called up your call center number and Mr. Jitendra picked up the call. I explained him the problem then he said that he would check with the bus operator and would call me back within 20 minutes.

However there was no call from your end for a long time.
So frustrated at this, I had to call you back; this time I had to explain the whole problem again to Mr. Fareed Ahmed, who picked up the call.
Then he said he could neither help or arrange for an alternative.

This whole episode caused me utter inconvenience and severe mental trauma as there was no alternative way to travel to Anaparthi, where I had to go to urgently, nor did I have a place to stay in the midnight.

So hereby I request you to kindly
1) Do the needful to compensate me for my loss
2) Take a strict action against the bus operator and
3) Remove the bus operator from your service list.
4) Please escalate this issue to the highest level of your customer care and other concerned departments.

Anticipating your appropriate response at the earliest.
Thanking you…

Best regards,
Krishna Reddy
Mobile: +91-9987375860
Homepage: Krishna-Reddy.com

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:03 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:

Makemytrip

Book return trip bus tickets and get 10% cash back on both the tickets.

*T&C Apply
Booking Details
From: Hyderabad Bus Operator: Model Travels Make My Trip Id: BUS50009116874053
To: Anaparthi Bus Type: Non A/C Seater (2+2) Operator PNR: TC6668637834
Journey Date: 8-May-10 Passengers: 1 Ticket Number: MODEL147521-MT 901
Boarding Time: 10:40 PM  Total Fare: Rs.340.0    
*Please reach your boarding point 15 minutes before the scheduled boarding time
Passenger Details
S.No Name Seat Seat Type S.No Name Seat Seat Type
1.  Mr Krishna Reddy  J1  Seater         
Boarding Point Details
Boarding Point: Panjagutta
Location: Panjagutta Landmark: Petrol Bunk
Address: Punjagutta,Civil Supplies Building, Petrol Bunk,
Bus Operator Contact Number: 040-64615555,64566555,23150378,23154599,9246191955
Frequently Asked Questions
  • What documents I need to board my bus?
    Please carry a print out of this e-ticket along with an identity proof with your photograph on it. Failing to do so, you may not be allowed to board the bus.
  • Do I need to reconfirm my booking?
    No, your booking is confirmed and there is no need to re confirm the same.
  • How do I cancel my ticket?
    Please mail us at [email protected] or call us at 0124-462-8765 (Standard Charges Apply) or 1800-103-8765 (Toll Free) to cancel your e-ticket.
    MakeMyTrip would not be able to process refunds for cancellations done directly with the bus operators.
  • Can I do partial cancellations (e.g. cancel only 2 passengers out of 4 booked)?
    Partial cancellations are not allowed. You would need to cancel the entire ticket.
  • What are the cancellation charges if I cancel my e-ticket?
    A cancellation fee will be levied on every bus ticket cancelled. Applicable charges are:
    – Cancellation more than 24 hours before travel – 25% of the fare paid (Refund amount will be Rs 255)
    – Cancellation within 24 hours before travel – 100% of the fare paid (Refund amount will be Rs 0)
  • How do I contact MakeMyTrip.com?
    For your boarding point or departure time queries please call Model Travels directly at 040-64615555,64566555,23150378,23154599,9246191955 .
    To get in touch with MakeMyTrip.com, mail us as [email protected] or call us at 0124-462-8765 (Standard Charges Apply) or 1800-103-8765 (Toll Free).
Important Terms & Conditions
  • Agency: MakeMyTrip (India) Pvt. Ltd (hereinafter ‘MMT’) is only providing the services as agent of various tour operators (hereinafter ‘Operators’). MMT’s obligations are limited to issuance of ticket, providing information as made available to it and processing refunds. MMT is not responsible for the provision of services by the respective operator. MMT assumes no responsibility or liability for the actions or omissions of the operators including non-adherence of the scheduled timings, behavior of the operator’s staff, conditions inside the buses, loss of life or property, delay, breakdown or inconvenience suffered by the user or passenger.
  • The primary passenger is required to furnish a print out of the e-ticket and an identity proof with the passenger’s photograph on it at time of boarding the bus. Failing to do so, the bus operator may not allow boarding.
  • The bus e-ticket booked is non transferable.
  • The bus operator reserves the right to change the seat number(s) of the passenger(s).
  • The bus operator reserves the right to change the boarding point and/or using a pick-up vehicle at the boarding point to take customers to the bus departure point
  • The departure and arrival timings mentioned on the e-ticket are only tentative timings. The same are subject to change.
  • The bus trips may be delayed, postponed or cancelled due to unavoidable reasons.
  • Provision of video/air conditioning or any such other services is the responsibility of the bus operator. Any refunds/claims due to non-functioning or unavailability of these services needs to be settled directly with the service provider (the bus operator).
  • In the event of cancellation of a bus/service trip, MMT’s liability will be limited only to the extent of refunding the sum paid by the passenger for the price of the e-ticket.
  • In case the bus operator changes the type of bus due to unavoidable reasons, MMT will refund the differential amount (difference in fare between the bus type booked and bus type provided, where a lower bus type is provided) to the customer upon being intimated by the customer within 3 days of the journey.


Jyoti Basu passes away

Former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu’s body being taken to his residence from the hospital on Sunday afternoon
Marxist patriarch and former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, who was battling for life in a hospital in Kolkata for the last fortnight, died on Sunday. “I have to give you the sad news that Jyoti Basu is no longer with us,” Biman Bose, the chairman of the Left Front coordination committee, told reporters around 1230 IST.
An emotional Bose said Jyoti Babu is no longer in this world.
Basu, 96, who had suffered multi-organ failure was on a temporary pacemaker since late Saturday night.
Basu’s personal physician Dr Ajit Kumar Maity said that the veteran leader breathed his last at 11:47 am at the AMRI Hospital where he was admitted with pneumonia on January 1.
He was put on a ventilator on January 6. Basu, who strode the political arena like a colossus for over six decades, is survived by son Chandan. His wife Kamal pre-deceased him four years ago. The Communist Party of India leader was the longest serving chief minister in Indian political history. A founder member of the CPI-M politburo from the days of its inception in 1964, Basu was regarded as many as the ‘cornerstone of Bengal politics.’

Born on July 8, 1914, in an upper middle class Bengali family in Kolkata, Basu’s father Nishikantha Basu was a doctor. After attaining school education from St Xavier’s Collegiate School and graduation from Presidency College Arts Faculty in Kolkata, Basu travelled to the United Kingdom to study law, where he was introduced to the Communist Party of Britain.

Basu returned to India in 1940, and after qualifying for the bar, he became a full-timer in the Communist Party of India. Basu was elected to the Bengal legislative assembly in 1946, contesting the railway constituency.

When the Communist Party of India split in 1964, Basu became one of the first nine members of the Politburo of the newly formed Communist Party of India-Marxist. In 1967 and 1969, Basu became deputy chief minister of West Bengal in the United Front government.

From June 21, 1977 to November 6, 2000, Basu served as the chief minister of West Bengal for the Left Front government. In 1996, Basu seemed all set to be the consensus leader of the United Front for the post of prime minister of India.

However, the CPI-M politburo decided not to participate in the government, and Janata Dal-Secular leader H D Deve Gowda instead became the Prime Minister.

Basu resigned from the chief ministership of West Bengal in 2000 for health reasons and was succeeded by fellow CPI-M politician Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. 

Source: rediff news
Jyoti Basu is a fan of Swami Vivekananda – Sri Sri Ravishankar

Why sms'es are limited to 160 characters

Credit: Lori Shepler / Los Angeles TimesAlone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.
That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.
“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”
The communications researcher and a dozen others had been laying out the plans to standardize a technology that would allow cellphones to transmit and display text messages.  Because of tight bandwidth constraints of the wireless networks at the time — which were mostly used for car phones — each message would have to be as short as possible.
Before his typewriter experiment, Hillebrand had an argument with a friend about whether 160 characters provided enough space to communicate most thoughts. “My friend said this was impossible for the mass market,” Hillebrand said. “I was more optimistic.”
His optimism was clearly on the mark. Text messaging has become the prevalent form of mobile communication worldwide. Americans are sending more text messages than making calls on their cellphones, according to a Nielsen Mobile report released last year.
U.S. mobile users sent an average of 357 texts per month in the second quarter of 2008 versus an average of 204 calls, the report said.
Texting has been a boon for telecoms. Giants Verizon Wireless and AT&T each charge 20 to 25 cents a message, or $20 for unlimited texts. Verizon has 86 million subscribers, while AT&T’s wireless service has 78.2 million.
And Twitter, the fastest growing online social network, which is being adopted practically en masse by politicians, celebrities …

… and news outlets, has its very DNA in text messaging. To avoid the need for splitting cellular text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user’s unique address.

Back in 1985, of course, the guys who invented Twitter were probably still playing with Matchbox cars.

Friedhelm Hillebrand

Credit: Friedhelm Hillebrand

Hillebrand found new confidence after his rather unscientific investigations. As chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market, he pushed forward the group’s plans in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, they decreed, must support the short messaging service (SMS).
Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.
This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.
“We were looking to a cheap implementation,” Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. “Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system.”
Initially, Hillebrand’s team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn’t seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Still, his committee wondered, would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two “convincing arguments,” Hillebrand said.
For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.
Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards. 
Just look at your average e-mail today, he noted. Many can be summed up in the subject line, and the rest often contains just a line or two of text asking for a favor or updating about a particular project.
But length wasn’t SMS’s only limitation. “The input was cumbersome,” Hillebrand said. With multiple letters being assigned to each number button on the keypad, finding a single correct letter could take three or four taps. Typing out a sentence or two was a painstaking task.

Sms-doc

A GSM document outlining the definition of SMS. Credit: Friedhelm Hillebrand.

Later, software such as T9, which predicts words based on the first few letters typed by the user, QWERTY keyboards such as the BlackBerry’s and touchscreen keyboards including the iPhone’s made the process more palatable.
But even with these inconveniences, text messaging took off. Fast. Hillebrand never imagined how quickly and universally the technology would be adopted. What was originally devised as a portable paging system for craftsmen using their cars as a mobile office is now the preferred form of on-the-go communication for cellphone users of all ages.
“Nobody had foreseen how fast and quickly the young people would use this,” Hillebrand said. He’s still fascinated by stories of young couples breaking up via text message.
When
he tells the story of his 160-character breakthrough, Hillebrand says, people assume he’s rich. But he’s not.
There are no text message royalties. He doesn’t receive a couple of pennies each time someone sends a text, like songwriters do for radio airplay. Though “that would be nice,” Hillebrand said.
Now Hillebrand lives in Bonn, managing Hillebrand & Partners, a technology patent consulting firm. He has written a book about the creation of GSM, a $255 hardcover tome.
Following an early retirement that didn’t take, Hillebrand is pondering his next project. Multimedia messaging could benefit from regulation, he said. With so many different cellphones taking photos, videos and audio in a variety of formats, you can never be sure whether your friend’s phone will be able to display it.
But he’s hoping to make a respectable salary for the work this time.
— Mark Milian

Source: Why text messages are limited to 160 characters

Site traffic is shooting up!

My blog traffic is shooting up doing well in traffic for the past few months!
It is a combined traffic of several blogs/ websites which includes krishna-reddy.com, blog.krishna-reddy.com, blog.artoflivingyoga.info, interesting.krishna-reddy.com, artofliving.rediffiland.com which now redirects to blogs.rediff.com/artofliving etc. Though it is a combined traffic of several sites, it’s good enough given that I don’t spend much time blogging. Aiming to cross 1000 page visits soon!

KCR's statement on Telangana

In an angry reaction to Centre’s backtracking on Telangana issue, TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao tonight announced that MPs, MLAs and other elected representatives of the region will submit their resignations and a 48-hour bandh tomorrow.

“Chidambaram statement amounts to putting the Telangana issue on the backbruner. We have been betrayed once again by the state of the Home Minister.

“There is no clarity or time frame fixed. In the name of consensus will they take 150 years? How much time they are going to take (for creating Telangana)?” he told a press conference at the residence of Congress leader Jana Reddy and flanked by leaders from other parties. .
Source: PTI News

On the day Home Minister P. Chidambaram appealed for calm in Andhra Pradesh and said all stakeholders would be consulted on creating a Telangana state, Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) chief K. Chandrasekhara Rao Wednesday appealed to the cental government to immediately begin the constitutional process for forming the new state. He also said political consensus could never be achieved on the issue.
Addressing a meeting at the TRS office here hours before Chidambaram made his statement in New Delhi, Chandrasekhara Rao warned the government against making any statement that might provoke the people of Telangana.
“Already there is uproar in Telangana. Students, lawyers and others are coming out on the streets. We have been patient and calm. Don’t raise the emotions. Don’t play with the people of Telangana otherwise they will not keep quiet,” KCR, as Chandrasekhara Rao is known, added.
He also warned that all legislators from the region, irrespective of their party affiliations, would resign if the government backtracked on Telangana and reduce the Congress government to a minority.
KCR again warned that the people of Telangana were ready to lay down their lives to achieve their goal.
He said talks on moving a resolution in the assembly or achieving a political consensus would not help. “The political consensus can’t be arrived at even after 100 years because they (the Andhra and Rayalseema regions) will never agree to the formation of Telangana state,” he added.
KCR, whose 11-day hunger strike last month had prompted Chidambaram to make his Dec 9 statement on Telangana, said a resolution in the assembly was not required as the Indian constitution and various verdicts of Supreme Court were clear on creating new states.
He announced that a Joint Action Committee of legislators, MPs and other public representatives of Telangana, as also lawyers, students and others fighting for the new state would be formed to chalk out the future course of action.
Source: twocircles.net

Other update: Rosaiah’s hails Chidambaram’s statement.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister K Rosaiah tonight welcomed Home Minister P Chidambaram’s statement on the contentious Telangana statehood issue and said it should not be seen as either a victory or defeat for one region or the other.

Rosaiah called for withdrawal of all forms of agitations for and against Telangana and asked the MPs, MLAs and MLCs, who had resigned either favouring or opposing a new state, to retrace their steps.

He said the state government supported “each letter” of Chidambaram’s statement which has done “equal and appropriate justice to people of all regions of Andhra Pradesh,” Rosaiah told a press conference at the end of an emergency meeting of the state cabinet late this evening.
Source: PTI News