I usually book rooms using booking.com or Airbnb whenever I travel. Occasionally I have used MakeMyTrip and Goibibo. My preference is booking.com as it has a very flexible cancellation policy, no hidden charges and pay at hotel options. I move to other platforms only when I find cheaper options. I travelled with my family to Tirupathi recently, and I booked the hotel using Oyo. But the experience did not go well.
While searching for hotels in booking.com, I found some “Oyo” hotels listed with most of them having no reviews. I never book accommodation that does not have a review or if the ratings are less than 7 stars. The list of Oyo rooms made me think about trying Oyo directly. We needed just a clean and safe room as we would be out sightseeing most of the times.
Booking process
Booking using Oyo was an easy process. I first registered using my email and mobile. After receiving the OTP, and entering it, the account was created. I found one of the hotels that had a decent number of reviews and booked it. The good part was that Oyo provided “Pay at hotel” option. I got an email about confirmation, and everything looked fine.
A few minutes later, I got an SMS on the booking. It has asked me to send a missed call to a number to confirm the booking. Why cannot some people keep things simple? That looked strange but anyway gave a missed call to that number. I got another SMS mentioning that the booking is confirmed. There was also a link for me to pay the amount. I checked my confirmation, and it said that I could pay at the hotel. So, I did not bother to pay online.
Shock at the hotel
When we went to the hotel at 5 in the evening, the receptionist mentioned that he is not able to find my name on the list. I showed him the confirmation, and he checked it against the confirmation id. The status of the booking showed as cancelled!! That was unexpected, but once I came out of initial shock, I was not too worried. Tirupathi is a big town, and finding a hotel was not challenging. At that time, I had three options.
- Try booking directly at the hotel.
- Call Oyo consumer care and explain the situation. Get an alternate property.
- Don’t bother about Oyo and book using other platforms. Anyway, I had not made payment to Oyo.
I checked with the hotel whether they had any rooms, but he said that it was full. There was no point further discussing with them. I did not try the second option as I had a car and needed a hotel with parking facility. Oyo has a lot of small hotels in the city centre, and parking could be a problem. Also, I was not sure of the capability of Oyo guys to provide a solution quickly. I went to booking.com and booked a room in another hotel within a few minutes. No issues there.
Consumer care
I then sent out a mail to the consumer care team of Oyo. The automated response was swift, and it said that someone would respond within 24 hours. I did not get any response for that email. Then I called their consumer care. At least the call was by picked up immediately. I was bit shocked when they said that the cancellation was initiated from my side and it happened at 4:17 PM on the day of check-in. I was driving at that time!! When starting challenging their claims, apart from being apologetic, they could not offer any reasoning. All she said that it would not happen again. Useless conversation.
Later, I thought about how the cancellation could have happened. This is only my theory. I had got a call from a Kolkata number while driving to Tirupati at around the same time as the cancellation. It was disconnected before I could pick up the call. Later, I realised that it was from Oyo. The booking I had made was with “Pay at hotel” option. With no credit card information, there is no way to charge cancellation if we had decided not to turn up. So, when the call went unanswered, the cancellation would have happened. But it was unethical from Oyo side to put it on the consumer. The bad part was that I did not even get an email or SMS on cancellation. Another possibility is that there was overbooking and they decided to cancel mine. Else, the hotel should have had a room when we went for check-in.
Will I book with Oyo again?
I do not think so. While no platform is foolproof (I also had issues with booking.com earlier) but the attitude of the Oyo consumer care forces me to stay away from that platform. With alternate options available, I do not see a reason to go back to Oyo. I also looked online on whether any other person had a similar issue. There were many Oyo complaints. Lot of people complained about hotels hot honouring reservations from Oyo or amenities not matching the claims in the website.
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