I called to book my Air Tickets through an agent called 'Make My Trip.com'. I had to call them to know the status of my tickets later. Per the agency website, [protected] is a Airtel toll free number. I called to them on Jan 02, 2007 at 10:07 P.m. The call went for 14 minutes and to my surprise, I was charged Rs.140 @ the rate of 10/min. When contacted Make my trip Customer care, they have written to me saying that it is a toll free number and clearly stated they receive calls to that toll number every day from their customers. So, I contacted Airtel Customer Care regarding the same.
Initially, Some of the Airtel executives said that it is not a toll free number but later they said that it is a toll free number and promised me that the amount will be refunded in 24 hours. But it didn't happen as promised. When I called the Customer care, they again promised that it will happen in 2 hours. This same old story repeated many a times. I called to Airtel Service more than 11 times. Now, they say that it is not a toll free number.
There are lot of discrepancies prevailing with the Airtel executives. I have written to Airtel customer care but no response from them so far. If this prevails for long then Airtel will soon lose its good customers in the near future.
Airtel Sucks. I got a prepaid connection from a dealer after filling out all the required forms and submitting all the proofs. And suddenly with a 2 hour SMS notice they disconnected my outgoing saying I had not submitted some proofs or whatever. Then I had to do the proverbial pillar to post thing and had to call them up like 100 times to find out what I need to do. The dealer kept blaming Airtel and Airtel was clueless saying that there was some problem with the submitted documents and that I have to resubmit again. But they wouldn't tell me what was the problem. I asked to talk to a senior person who kept repeating the same thing asking me to resubmit and when I told them that if they did'nt tell me the reason I would risk documents 'rejection' again, she seemed to cook up some reason and told me I needed a local address or something. Finally someone called from the Airtel office and told me that they would activate it, but it would take 4 hours due to technical issues and 'TRAI' regulations. I have been without outgoing for 24 hours. It takes them 2 minutes to activate connection when you are signing up. But now they need 4 hours. Which is just plain stupid. On the whole, a bitter experience. Only reason I am not moving to a different operator right now is that I unfortunately topped my card for a large amount, apart from the headache of having to update my number with all the contacts!