As one who keeps an eagle eye on these mushrooming online travel agencies, I’d always thought that startups such as cleartrip and makemytrip would be any day better than the offshoots of the established brick and mortar travel agencies such as *cox & kings *and *thomas cook. *Recently, I had occasion to use *cox & kings’ *online avatar, *ezeego1, *and was pleasantly surprised to have my assumptions proved wrong.
To begin with, the discount schemes offered by ezeego1, *were simply unbeatable.*30% off on the base fare on *go air *and 25% off on the base fare on *indian. *Booking on the site was a slightly roller-coaster affair thanks to glitches at the ezeego1 end.the site would hang at the payment stage(though the ezeego1 people blamed it on problems with the indian database server) However, the customer service people were very helpful though it wasn’t all that easy to get through to them. This, despite a provision for you to leave your number for them to call you back.
It was only after booking that I realised that my return ticket on *Indian *was a paper ticket and would have to be couriered to me. Though I gave an address in the city from which I had to get a flight back, I was somewhat worried as to whether the ticket would reach me or would end up being sent to my billing address, 3000 kilometers away! The call centre people assured me that the ticket would reach the right address within three working days, and to my relief, the ticket was indeed deliverered to the right address in Kochi that same evening.
The cash back(amounting to 2k)on the tickets I bought on two different schemes was also credited to my credit card account within the promised ten working days time period, which is pretty good when compared with the trouble I had to go to to get a paltry amount of Rs.200 back under a discount scheme offered by *cleartrip.
So, despite the bumpy ride, I must say that, overall, I have been satisified by my experience with ezeego1.
P.S. For a list of Online Travel Agencies(OTAs) and current offers, you can check out my squidoo page at https://squidoo.com/flyindia
15 October 2007 Update: In the interests of the buying public, let me add here that Ezeego1 has not been able to scale up its customer care in response to its undeniably attractive offers. So, if there’s any glitch in your booking or if you have a query, be prepared for a very frustrating experience if you try to contact Customer Care. As the age old saying goes, *caveat emptor:-)
7 January 2008 Update 2: I had occasion to use ezeego1 again last week and the entire process was seamless and painless. Though they promised the cashback on my ICICI bank card within 21 working days, it was credited within 3 days. I was also able to get through to customer service within a couple of minutes of dialing so they either have scaled up their customer service, or a lot of people have been scared off by the reviews on mouthshut:-)