More often than not, there is a reason behind me scribbing something. A series of events in the past couple of days has motivated me to write this one.
Its not often that I try to organize a trip, for I am the kind of person who would just step out of the house and head in the direction which seems to catch my attention and which seems to tickle my curiosity about this World.
But this time around, I am trying to organize my trip. Well, lets not go into the reasons for the same 😉 but one thing I can assure you is that it is indeed for a beautiful reason that I am doing so :).
While browsing through all the deals and offers that the travel/tour sites in our country seem to bombard us with, I came across one such deal which seemed to fit in my scheme of things. On digging a little deeper into the deal, what I found was really perplexing and surprising.
A number of so called hidden charges were staring me in my face, and my budget all set to shoot up to nearly one and a half times of what I had calculated earlier after seeing the deal. If this was not enough, the deal brought along with itself a hell number of taxes, not displayed in the deal.
Thank God that I hadn’t booked the same. Even then, there are three things that I am wondering about constantly since I last talked to the agent.
One: how non-transparent a World we are living in?
Second: what if I had booked the same without going into the details (which many of us do at times trusting the face value of a deal)? Are there any redressal mechanisms in place where one can cite his/her greivance? Does it come under the Consumer Protection Act? Third: If there is no rule or Act covering the same, then our government would do well to regulate this menace and play its part in this ever perpetuating phenomenon of capitalization and commercialization of our lives? On one hand, where our lives have become much easier because of the goodies that Information Technology has to offer, one needs to be careful about the other side of the same. And in order to improve these ills, our government should step-in and perform its role of a welfare state by instilling transparency and accountability in our system. Source for Image: http://honeymoonnation.com/honeymoon-travel-agent/
Road to Discovery 