Obstacle Of The Day: Airlines In India No Longer Accepting Foreign-Issued Credit Cards

I have been trying to book my flight from Mumbai to Delhi for the past week. There are many airlines and many flights that are available. Unfortunately, due to a "widespread fraud" that the airlines encountered a month or two ago, they do not accept foreign-issued credit cards. Period. That leaves only going to a travel agent to book the flight. That would seem to be perfectly acceptable but travel agents double or even triple the fare when it comes to domestic Indian travel. Of course no one just comes out and tells you all of this. It's all discovered piecemeal by actually going to each website and going through the booking and registration process and then, after the very last step, when you click PURCHASE, it brings up some seemingly-benign message like "Input Correct Phone Number." In case it's not obvious to you, that is code for "we don't accept foreign credit cards." If it wasn't obvious to you, you might spend, say, an hour or so trying to figure out what the phone number should look like before you brace yourself and make the call to India to see what the problem is.

I finally did find an Indian agency that does not double the fare and is willing to accept my credit card if I will fax them a "Letter of Dispatch" and a photocopy of my credit card. I chatted with a helpful representative and she told me to fax the document ASAP and she would take care of it. Then I tried faxing. But it failed to go through... I think it took 11 attempts before it finally worked. And now the agency is unable to locate the fax.

I did find a great resource for researching travel planning in India: IndiaMike.com. It contains forums by people who are passionate about travel in the region and who are intimately familiar with the vagaries of Indian travel planning. Here are some of the forums I've been perusing:

Knowing the Indian Train - contains everything about classes, food, vendors, reservations, cancellations, etc.

Booking Indian Rail Tickets from abroad - self explanatory

Train Information - still more information about trains in India

Scams and Annoyances

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