Hello everyone planning on investing in a package holiday tour with Make my Trip. Here is a concise account of how our trip went with this god awful travelling agency:
1) Exorbitant price, underwhelming itinerary - We had opted for a 5N 6D Maharashtra package with a 2N stay in Mumbai, 2N in Lonavala and 1N in Alibaugh. So the itinerary had roughly covered( and I cannot stress enough on how "roughly" and inadequately the itinarary had been curated for a package worth 1.07 lakhs) a fraction of the most renowned but extremely generic tourist spots leaving behind a hoard of amazing spots.
2) Timed and restricted tourism - So, the cab service that was assigned for our trip was instructed to only cover for 6 hours tops each day in every city and sometimes lesser than 6hours in the outskirts of Mumbai.For example they started keeping track of travel time(by car) for Day 1 even before our flight landed in the Mumbai Airport. Nothing about this was previously mentioned by any of the tour consultants on their briefing calls. The travel coordination team would time and religiously monitor the driver’s coverage for the day and constantly call him to ensure that he was not taking a detour, even a minor one from the otherwise pre-planned itinerary. Hence, despite our wishes and asks we had to spend most of our time in the car because the driver would refuse to let us explore a spot in detail or even properly for that matter and would also rudely stop the car midway to consult with the coordinator regarding our legitimate demands if they did not align with his.
3) Extortion of money and surplus charges - On one of the MMT Briefing calls, we had asked the consultant if we would be able to explore a couple of extra spots besides the chosen ones from the itinerary to which they had confirmed that if the travel coordinator agreed to accommodate our demands logistically then we could definitely avail the opportunity.However, the coordinator seemed extremely stringent and rude with their plans. They charged us Rs 800 for only 3.5 hrs extra(paid directly to the driver-not sure if this is allowed from a business standpoint?), which is Rs 200 for every hour beyond the scheduled 6 hours. Such extortion on top of the package price is absolutely unconscionable.
4) Callousness and Driver’s lack of knowledge about the trip and the city - We were assigned a driver from UP who was residing in Mumbai in Chembur and had recently started working with MMT. We were quite appalled to see that despite having taken on the job of a driver whose only job is to know his way around the city was constantly on his phone consulting "google maps" for every single location that he drove us to.Being a resident you would expect a person to know atleast 1/4th’s of a city, but unfortunately this person was extremely oblivious of almost all the tourist spots and constantly kept repeating that he "disliked" Mumbai and wanted to pick a different state for touring which is highly unprofessional and unethical. That apart, he also did not make an effort to listen to our suggestions and requests regarding visiting tourist spots/venues, parking etc and only prioritised his own choices. For example- he would frequently park miles away from where we would request him to pick us up from, constantly repeating rubbish reasons like "the police didn’t let me park here or they would be charging me more if I park here etc ". He would constantly save money because he was seemingly on a budget when it came to paying off tolls and parking fees which was also not mentioned on the briefing calls.
5) Uncouth behaviour of driver - Towards the end of the trip, the driver’s behaviour kind of changed for the worst. He seemed more erratic, his driving lacked proper balance .he was speeding on certain roads and would suddenly push brakes causing us to jump off our seats. During the trip however, he drove as slowly as possible to waste our time. And lastly he started hurling expletives towards another driver on the road which seemed unwarranted and in poor taste.
6) Illogical selection of hotels - Despite knowing that most of the tourist venues would be miles away from the hotel selected during our Mumbai stay, MMT still chose a sub par hotel close to the airport and extremely inconvenient to travel back and forth from tourist spots. Our travel time was cut short due to transit issues in Mumbai.
All said, I would request everyone to kindly NEVER EVER do anything with this corrupt company and certainly never invest in any of their services. It’s a ton of CRAP!