OYO CEO apologises to man who found the rooms he booked in Puducherry did not exist

Abhishant Pant spoke about his experience in detailed in a LinkedIn post. (Screengrab from video posted on LinkedIn by Abhishant Pant)

A group of nine people who recently travelled for more 3,000 kilometres to Puducherry got a rude shock on reaching their destination. They found that the rooms that they had booked on OYO did not exist.

One of the members of the group, Abhishant Pant, wrote a long post on LinkedIn about the experience and also shot a video of the property

The group had booked rooms at OYO 74612 Royal Plaza Boarding and Lodging. But on getting there on the night of December 24, they discovered that it was a deserted place with a growth of wild plants.

The man said he and his fellow travellers found themselves stranded on a deserted road at night.

Pant claimed that when he called OYO’s customer service, he was told that the no other lodgings could be arranged for the group. But when he checked himself, he found that more than 50 properties were available.

“It was clear that she [the customer service agent] was not empowered to help us and had no way of escalation to solve it,” Pant wrote in his post.

The man complained that the customer service representative was not concerned about the group, which included two women, being stranded in the middle of nowhere at night.

“Finally, when I kept on pursuing, the customer service agent responded, please take it up with Makemytrip we can't do anything about it,” Pant said. “The lady on the other side kept on insisting that she would send mail to the quality check team but had no way of solving it right now.”

Pant said he and his fellow travellers then made several calls to other hotels to try and get a place for the night.

“Eventually, we settled at Hotel Corbelli in heritage town for one night and then had to still search for another place for next day,” Pant added. “Considering it is Christmas weekend, the last-minute hotel booking made the cost of stay double.”

After his ordeal, the man found out that customers had been complaining about the non-existent hotel over the last one year

“Ritesh [OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal] your organization, still continued to put this hotel on the listing,” Pant said. "If you had bothered to look at it, you would have saved unnecessary agony at our end. Worse was the fact that this place was deserted and god forbid if we would have got looted.”

The man said that he would file a case against OYO.

Rohit Kapoor, OYO’s chief executive officer for India and South-East Asia, apologised to Pant for the trouble shortly after he posted about his experience on LinkedIn.

“This does not meet our standards at all and we are conducting a thorough investigation to take corrective steps, both for your experience as well as making more systemic changes,” Kapoor said in a comment on Pant's post.

Kapoor asked Pant to message him his location. “I will be in touch with the resolution as well as to learn more from your experience,” he added. “Ritesh has also DM'd [direct message] you on this and he is absolutely committed to solving this for you and for every one of our customers.”