CABS - What's your pick??

Life has been annoyingly hectic and I’m big time complaining about it to almost everyone. I’m beginning to get scared if people will find it depressing to be around me because I’m mumbling curses every other minute. To add to my agony, I have had some really bad experiences with cabs in the last two to three months and I would want to bore you guys with it.

So I generally book a cab when hubby or I want to go to the airport or when I have to go to IIMB early in the morning. Meru Cabs was my first tryst with the Cab world. I had heard a lot of good and bad things about them and decided to try my luck with them. So I booked a cab to the airport and I was mighty pleased to find out that the service was really good and I and hubby reached the airport on time. They had earned my respect and from then on Meru it would be for any long distance intra city service.

A couple of months back when I was booking a cab over the phone, I was baffled by the recorded voice instructions telling me a lot of new things and the one that really caught my attention was the fact that they would charge me Rs 25 as convenience charge if I wanted to book a cab in the next 30 minutes and Rs 50 as convenience charge if I wanted to book a cab later than 30 minutes in addition to the fare charges. It also said that there would be no convenience charge if I booked online. So I immediately disconnected the call, logged into their website and booked a cab and while it was processing my request, I really had a bad feeling and Voila!! I got a wonderful message in Red text that there were no cabs available and they were sorry. Well this was the time when I was ignorant about other alternative cab services and I called up their customer care to book a cab, I really did not care shelling out Rs 50 as long as I got to my destination. What really surprised me was the fact that they confirmed my booking when I called them after informing me that they would charge me Rs 50 as convenience charge. Now where did that extra cab come from?

There was this time when I had an exam to write at IIMB and ended up booking a Meru cab for 7.00AM. We are supposed to get an SMS half an hour prior to the pickup time about the cab details and I realized that it was 6.45 AM and I had still not received any SMS and I started to panic and trust me 90% of the time when an SMS does not arrive on time, it means something is wrong. I called up the customer care, got the number of the driver from them and called him up and the damn idiot very calmly told me that his vehicle had broken down and he doesn’t know how much time it would take him to fix it. I blew my top, how irresponsible of him to not call me up and inform me. I called the customer care and shouted at them but my husband thinks I am too well mannered even while shouting at people so he took it upon himself to give them a sound beating. Thankfully I made it somehow to IIMB on time that day, I’m not going to give the details of that fiasco.

This was when I realized that I had enough of Meru cabs and it was time to change to a different cab service and that is when I started noticing Easy Cabs patrolling the roads. Whenever I would call them to book a cab, I would find it really weird when they would say that my booking would be confirmed 30 minutes prior to pickup time. I mean it was completely irrational of them to inform you 30 minutes before the designated time if your cab is confirmed or cancelled. I mean just imagine that there is no availability of cabs and they send a cancellation SMS 30 minutes prior to your pick up time. That would be nothing short of a disaster if you are going to the airport at 3.00 AM in the morning or you are on your way to write an important exam. So I presumed that they wouldn’t be so foolish to come up with such a stupid policy and whenever the person on the other side said, “Your booking will be confirmed 30 minutes prior to pick up time and we will send your booking ID in the next 2 minutes”, I always thought they meant that my booking is confirmed and they would send me the cab details 30 minutes prior to pick up time. Everything was going on well with Easy Cabs when on one fateful day I realized that I had not received any SMS about the cab details and I called up customer care and to my horror they informed me that they had cancelled my booking due to non availability of cabs and they sent me a cancellation SMS. What the hell?? And this was exactly what I told the customer care guy and where the hell was the cancellation SMS, I never received anything. When the guy told me that it was their policy to inform the customer about the booking status 30 min prior to pick up is when I realized that my assumptions were all wrong and these people’s policies totally suck!!

I immediately had a change of mind and decided to switch to Meru Cabs, at least they let you know immediately whether your booking is confirmed or not even if you have to shell out some extra bucks unlike Easy Cabs that keeps you hooked onto them till the last minute just to inform you that your booking is cancelled and you can go to hell for all they care.