[Resolved]  MakeMyTrip India — makemytrip visa services

This is a story of two people who wanted to visit Singapore.
We planned this trip for my boyfriend’s birthday. Visiting Singapore Zoo and SEA have been on his bucket list since a long time and I would not miss any opportunity to visit Universal Studios, and thus, the idea of this trip was born. We saved up for a couple of months and were very eagerly looking forward to this trip.
We made one mistake while planning this trip, which was choosing MakeMyTrip for our ticketing and visa needs. A mistake which was going to make us terribly regret, ever considering, going on this trip.

Here’s a review of my recent harrowing, experience with MakeMyTrip:

Firstly, MakeMyTrip claims to provide visa services but does not have the following:
An area in their website where you can avail or track the said service (It’s app only for some reason)
A toll free number/extension or email id for visa services
Any specific information which you can go through before you avail the service (It’s a pay first and worry about it after policy!)

First, you pay for the service, which I did and applied for a tourist visa for Singapore, and also uploaded scanned copies of several documents. Then, “someone” is supposed to get in touch with us to take this process further. When? I didn’t know. What happens if you miss the call? Are we supposed to sit by our phone all day?
After missing the call, the first time, we received an email from them asking for a list of documents and in the email a phone number was finally revealed to us which was a toll free number. This number had an average wait time of 20 minutes (per try) and someone would pick up after your 4th or 5th try, if you are lucky.

After multiple conversations, a final list of documents was agreed upon which we couriered to them promptly. We were asked to file for Visa separately as we are not related, which is understandable and provide a set of documents each which we did very meticulously providing them with labels and copies, in a futile attempt to make things easier.

But then (after receiving our original set of documents), they asked for a series of additional documents which were never mentioned before.
According to their visa team as I am a “single lady” travelling to Singapore as a tourist, with my boyfriend, I need to give them the following documents from my Father:
A no objection certificate
Employment proof
Financial documents
A govt id proof

I have a few questions for their team:

Why are this documents needed? I am a 28 year old, adult.
Why was this not mentioned before?
Why is there no mention of this in the Singapore embassy website? Or anywhere else on the internet?

Their attitude in this process was so callous, that I had no faith left in them, and could not believe that even after providing said documents, I would be able to travel to Singapore. Honestly, at this point of time it seemed like it was easier to just bring my father along, on my trip.

My question to MakeMyTrip is, if this is genuinely the case with Singapore tourist visa, why wasn’t I informed before? Do your agents lack this knowledge or is it a standard practice to harass your customers after they are stuck having paid for the service and sending original documents ?

And in all of the above steps, for every, single, thing, we had to email them multiple times and wait for the call to connect for hours. Even for a basic thing like acknowledging the receipt of our courier (which had our original passports) they took 2 business days. (After bluedart confirmed that it had been delivered).

Now let me reveal the worst part. We were dealing with an agent named Kamini Bhasin who left no stone unturned in harassing us throughout this process. We were continuously “judged” by her and asked questions like: Why am I unmarried and not living with my father? How come we both have the same residential address? Why are we traveling together? Are we related by blood? And so on.

How is it any of your business? In which century do you live? Is this your hobby?
Does your job description involve helping your customers or harassing them?
You did an excellent job of trying to strip my identity. According to this lady, “I” do not matter. My documents do not suffice. I either need my father or to be married so that my “husband” can take my “responsibility”.

Even when we tried to cancel this service and decided not to go ahead with MakeMyTrip we had to follow up with multiple calls and emails. Finally, we got in touch with a different agent who promptly did this for us and returned our original documents.

Dear MakeMyTrip, me and my family have been loyal customers of yours since 2009 and I can assure you that this was the last time any o[censored]s would ever use any service provided by you. You made me go through all of this, face severe harassment and anxiety for weeks and made me feel helpless at the same time since my original documents were stuck with you and as mentioned before there was no proper phone number or email id to even get in touch with you.

Take action on this now, otherwise I can assure you that you will be losing many more customers very soon.