Online travel agency Goibibo has launched Go-Time Guarantee, a service which claims to guarantee refund processing within 2 hours of travel cancellation on the portal. The service also shares the exact minutes and seconds to process the refund. According to the company, if the refund doesn’t happen in 2 hours, it will credit Rs 100 for every hour of delay to the user’s GoCash wallet. Goibibo states that over 15% travellers (based on its own data) make changes to their trips which result in refunds which need to be issued to customers. It adds that in the GoTime Guarantee launch week, it processed 99% of applicable cases within 30 minutes. The company plans to launch ‘time guarantees’ for all processes on its site within the next 3-4 months. GoCash wallet: In January 2014, GoIbibo launched a closed wallet called goCash, offering it to customers as a solution for easily making online travel bookings after a previous booking had failed, for receiving rewards or redeeming points. According to the website, even though it took less than 24 hours to initiate refunds from banks in case a transaction failed, banks themselves take between 2 to 5 business days to credit the money back to the customer’s account. The company’s recent developments: - For the quarter ended December 31 (Q3FY16), the company claimed that 71% of its hotel bookings came via mobile, up from 57% two quarters ago. Desktop accounted for the rest 29% of the bookings and overall it saw over bookings…
