Lured by the summer offer of airtel and the prospect of getting more minutes per dollar, I went ahead to recharge my airtel account( this being my very bad experience with airtel earlier) this weekend. On saturday, I tried to access www.airtelcallhome.com, I am greeted with a “this site is under maintenance message”. This stayed for 2 days. I thought, that the site is going to be fixed of all the errors it is blamed for and now I can trust Airtel as good as Reliance. But, it took be just 10 mins to realize that the site is more buggy than ever. Please read my horror story

 I tried to click on ”recharge my account” and I got a error page. Wary of recharging over internet, I called the customer service and I am promised that the site is still in updating mode and it will take 24 hours for the issues to be fixed. I logged on the next day to try my luck. This time, as promised the site is up and I am able to feed in my credit card details and clicked “Recharge” now. I am just kept on the page for more than 10 mins before greeted with the message saying that ” error in processing, account not recharged” or something like that.  I checked my account details to see that my account is still showing my old balance. To be sure, I checked online statement of my credit card only to find that Bharti Airtel actually blocked $50 against my purchase.

Bharti customer service people told me that they never received the money and hence there is a problem in processing. When I called my credit card customer service they are telling me that the money is blocked for the merchant and it is theirs now. Which means, that my $50 is gone. Even today, I can see that I am billed for the same by Bharti Airtel.

I feel Airtel site is a big scam. When they are claiming themselves as the BEST, they should actually test the system against their own money before playing with peoples money. I request all to let me know how I can complain agains these people.