I was traveling with my cousin to Kolkata from Bangalore on 18th Oct evening. I had booked a cab to Blr airport using Ola cabs. The phone no of driver that was sent to me was incorrect. When I called him to check , he told me he is off duty and some one else will come.
The other driver called sometime later and didn’t know the way to my house. Since he didn’t speak hindi/english, it was impossible for me to explain the directions to him.After great difficulty, someone gave him the directions to reach my place. He was already 15 mins late by then. After that he didn’t know the route to the airport, he kept asking people for directions and ended up taking us through some random routes, crowded bus stands. Surprisingly, their staff later claimed that the driver who wasn’t able to speak /understand 1 word of english was apparently using Google maps and took me by the "optimum route". (Didn’t see him using any sort of map on my way though). God Knows, how people like these lie to run a business!
I called the call center for help during my travel and city manager assured us that he will find some short-cut to make us reach on time. Unfortunately that didn’t happen and we missed our flight. At about 6.30-7.00 Pm on 18th Oct, I called up my contact in Ola cabs who is in senior position to help me out. He told me to book flight tickets as the refund process etc. from the company will take time. He also assured me that someone from Ola cabs Blr office will call me to help out with the process. After that I booked flight tickets worth ~Rs. 37000 for 19th oct. On 19th oct when I got in touch with them for the refund, they denied it flat . I have been following up with them on this but nothing has materialized.
To save Rs. 250 for airport taxi, I ended up being spending Rs. 37000. Not to forget the trauma of dealing with Ola cabs pathetic customer service. Seems they spent all their funding money( a whopping 40 crores according to newspaper reports!) in developing fancy mobile apps. The idea of setting up customer support teams and solving their problems isn’t there in their to-do list. Promising customers something and then denying them of the same thing seems to be the common thing (maybe the working principle) of every Ola Cab employee. Avoid them! Even the local taxi guy will give you better service than these people.