How Twitter saved my holiday
Sidin Vadukut -
Friday, August 21, 2009 8:05 AM
Around 1:00 PM last Friday I was standing in the lobby of The River View Retreat somewhere inside Corbett National Park in Uttaranchal. There are glasses of welcome drink arranged on a table outside the resort's lobby, along with biscuits, but I rush past it in my eagerness to check in. The idea of course was to spend a longish weekend in the resort in the middle of the national park doing absolutely nothing besides a little reading and some DVD watching. The booking had been made absolutely at the last moment on the previous evening via a MakeMyTrip.com telephone operator. And we had been very lucky indeed to get a room. Every single other resort or hotel we called up anywhere in North India from Corbett to Dharamsala told us they were booked solid for the Independence Day weekend.
But then MakeMyTrip.com somehow managed to get a room at the Retreat and promptly arranged for a cab as well. After an eventful 8.5 hour drive from Delhi you can imagine our eagerness to check in. But then the staff at the reception did that funny group discussion thing over my reservation print-outs that made my stomach churn. (Air India and Gulf Air were particularly adept at this during my Kozhikode-Abu Dhabi-Kozhikode days. This group discussion almost always ended in an announcement that my flight was overbooked, no more seats and I should wait in coffee shop with cheese sandwich for next flight.)
No cheese sandwich here. They came back and told us that there was some confusion. MakeMyTrip had not confirmed my rooms with them and therefore there were none available. I should call MMT and sort things out. And they said it with a disconcerting finality.
I threw back a few welcome drinks and called the MakeMyTrip call center. After some punching through menus I finally reached an operator who promised to check and call me back in 10 minutes. Twenty minutes later nothing had happened and we (missus and I) were still headless chicken-like in the lobby.
Enraged I put out a Twitter message: Thank you
MakeMyTrip. I am at my hotel in Corbett and they don't have a room.
Never did. Sorry, but I am taking this very personally indeed.
Within ten minutes I had a call/tweet response from two MMT staffers including their head of marketing. I was reassured that everything would be fine, that they were sorry and a solution would be found shortly. All because of that one tweet.
Half an hour later we bundled back into our car with a new reservation already in my Blackberry for the Solluna Resort: a Sarovar property another forty minutes, deeper still, in the jungle.
I was still quite livid but I was pleasantly surprised at the speed in which a Twitter update, as opposed to the conventional customer service telephone route, got things done.That night at the Solluna resort, as we sat watching back episodes of The Office (US) there was a knock on our door and a Solluna staffer handed us a bottle of wine courtesy MakeMyTrip. (The 2006 Cabernet Shiraz blend from Jacob's Creek is now my favouritest wine ever.)
So next time you have trouble with your service provider why not drop a Twitter message? In my opinion it is the equivalent of standing outside, say, MMT's office and screaming at everyone walking in. And with companies like MMT watching their online brand equities so closely, don't be surprised if a response is immediately forthcoming. (Some of them, I am told, have staffers or third-party agencies following Twitter, blogs and Facebook full time.)
Twitter saved my holiday. Now will you please stop saying that the idea of 140-character updates making a difference to the world is stupid? Of course it can. With wine.
P.S. Sure I am a journalist. But I have a feeling that with if you had a Twitter account with any reasonable following, MMT would have responded in the exact same way.