As regards what your company should ‘take away’ from this? Since you asked for my opinion.
1) As mentioned I called within 10 minutes of making the error. I was not told that you would look into the issue. I was explicitly told that the ‘airline policy’ dictated that I had to cancel my booking. Pay the fees. Obviously unwarranted from where I stand, especially when it was said the fees are ‘refundable’ with minimal cancellation fees, if cancellation is before 24-36hrs before the flight. Did you mention *playing fair* in your reply to me?
If you look at your forums, you will see that my flight was booked for the 11th of Jan and my phone call to your team on the 6th of Jan.
My question to you: would you pony up more money to a company if you were in this situation? Would you pay the disproportionate cancellation fee and then book again with the same company? Honestly?

2) I had to meet a client and could not wait indefinitely for an answer that would or would not come. If your Customer service team by phone, forums OR by twitter (see the conversation on timeline), had at any point assured me that they were looking into the matter, I *may* have reconsidered taking my business elsewhere. Infact, this blog post would have probably given you credit for it.

3) Until your reply to this post, I had no idea if it was my protests to cleartrip.com OR my letters to Jet Airways that actually produced the desired outcome. No one in your organization notified me that *anything* was being done about my complaints. All the impressions I received clearly pointed *otherwise*. When your team finally notified me (via forums, on the 8th, when they could do so by twitter where they expressed helplessness too), I did commend them publicly (see my twitter timeline as well as your forums)

I suspect better training for your staff would resolve all these issues, but leave it to you to decide for yourself where the problem lay and, I hope, help your customers get the most out of the cleartrip.com experience, in the future.

Though your reply tends to paint cleartrip.com as a ‘victim’, the fact that you did reply here helps me decide that I will give your company another chance. I will also let all the folks (many of them your clients), who have read my original post, know that it was cleartrip.com that resolved the issue for me. Thank you for doing so.

I am one of Cleartrip’s founders and I’ve read your post with some interest. My personal thoughts on your experience are probably “biased”, like yours, due to my position.

To summarise the incident:

* You made a mistake while booking a ticket. An unfortunate mistake, but nevertheless a mistake which came with costs attached — the airline’s cancellation fees, lost payment gateway fees etc.
* After some back and forth with Cleartrip and the airline, Cleartrip agreed to let you cancel the booking and waived the fees for you. In effect, Cleartrip shouldered the financial costs for a mistake that was no fault of theirs.
* As a reward to Cleartrip for shouldering the costs of your mistake, you took your business elsewhere.

What should a company, like Cleartrip, take away from this?

* That “playing fair” when there’s social media involved implies that customers have zero accountability for their own actions?
* That even after “playing fair”, a customer will take his business elsewhere, so, why bother?

At Cleartrip, we try very, very hard to do right by our customers. We hope that customers will recognise that and reward it. If customers respond with entitlement instead, because we live in a world with Twitter and Facebook, then what does it teach a company to do?

Aside: Cleartrip have never used social media as a marketing podium alone — we actively serve customers through it every day.

These are my personal thoughts and should not be construed as anything otherwise.
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