My name is Gary, I’m retired and I have a home in Las Vegas, Nevada and an apartment outside Shanghai, China. In March 2005 I used makeymytrip.com to plan a 19 night 20 day trip out of Delhi. This was my first trip to India and we had a terrific time.
The trip was very well planned and the hotels were often the ’’fairly tale’’ variety even though I only paid for three star hotels. The bottom line on this outfit is they are legitimate, they won’t cheat you and they know what they are doing. I toured their offices in Delhi.
The building looks bad but the offices are very nice. They look like they have a staff of about 25 people on three floors. They didn’t bill my credit card until I showed up in Delhi where they picked us up at the airport. We made our own flight arrangements. I dealt directly with Ajay in Delhi via email and not with their New York office. Our driver for the trip was Dinesh and he was very good.
The trip cost me a grand a week for everything including car and driver and all hotels which included breakfast. I suspect you pay about a 30% premium for their services over what you could do yourself. However this outfit will completely plan your trip to the best sites and they did put us in some magnificent hotels. Prince Charles and Lady Di even stayed in one of them! I suspect that if you just hired your own car and driver and let him take you places that you would end up in shoddy hotels where the driver got the best kickback. We actually ate lunch in some of the other hotels in some towns and I could see we were in a much better hotel than other tourists.
That’s the positives and here are the negatives (negatives are more fun): I suspect that scams and hustles are a way of life in India. If you’ve been there then you know that. So makemytrip.com did come up with an itinerary and price and I said everything looked fine and I chose the three star hotel option. Then the next day I got an email suggesting I pay another $300 for an air conditioned car.
If you travel in India you must be able to roll up the windows. So this was a bit shoddy. Then I got to thinking what else they could hit me up for and sure enough they were going to charge an extra 4% for my use of a Visa card (normal in India). I got them to reduce the $300 to $150 and the Visa charge to 2%. A plus is that they charge your Visa card in New York City. If you use a Visa outside the USA now, Visa will tack on a 3% charge so this is a big plus for makemytrip. The price did include local guides in each of the cities we visited. After three of these guys I realized that using them was a bit like inviting a time share salesman to join you for the day. Bad news.
So I called Ajay on my cell phone and cancelled all the local tour guides and he agreed to refund the money for them. Ajay said they were government licensed people and he had no control over them - made sense to me. Most of what they did was hit me up for a big tip, take me to overpriced lunch spots where they got a big kickback and then on to grossly overpriced tourist markets to get another kickback.
They were very useful when they were touring a site with you. Oh, the first guide couldn’t keep his hands off my girlfriend. But this is not makemytrip’s fault. If you like you can hire a guide almost anywhere - they will pester you to hire them if you don’t have a guide.
Another problem I had was that makemytrip said the price included all entrance fees. They didn’t say that all the sites you visit are ’’monuments’’ and monument fees were not included. I called Ajay on this and he agreed to pay our entrance fees to the ’’monuments.’’ So I’m happy with this outfit and the trip was one of the best in my life.
India is fascinating/bizarre/unique. Bring your GSM cell phone and get a SIM card as soon as you arrive so you can complain to Ajay if you have a problem and call your driver whenever you need to. Bring a bottle of Pepto Bismol for each person. ATMS are everywhere and worked with my ATM card. Bring a three pronged (round prongs) electrical adapter for India for battery charging.
Final comment: try doing a trip like this in Europe for a grand a week! This was a very worthwhile deal.