Mismanagement and extortion
(Written on 15 Jul, 2018)
If you plan to visit Sikkim, NEVER book your trip with Yak n Yeti travels. I made that mistake and regret it. Satish Bardewa and his wife, Srujana, run this travel agency. Satish claims to be an emplo (Read More)yee of the Transport Department of Govt of Sikkim and Srujana, an employee of PWD, Sikkim and they both seem to be really busy when you try to reach them for any questions. After an internet search for travel agents in Sikkim (unfortunately, Yak n Yeti ranks high on the search), I had emailed a tentative itinerary to Satish Bardewa and asked him to send me the estimated cost, which he did. Afterwards, I discussed with him about a change in the itinerary to exclude Darjeeling and include North Sikkim and Pelling. I repeatedly called him and asked him to give me a revised estimate if the cost would change, but he said it was okay. As I did not want to carry a lot of cash on the trip, I told him that I wanted to make the full payment in advance. I then made the full payment before we started from Bangalore. What followed was a traveller's worst nightmare. My husband and I were travelling with our parents (aged 69, 75 and 80 years) and our twelve year old son. Right from landing at Bagdogra, where there was no taxi to pick us up (a taxi finally picked us up after we waited at Bagdogra for two hours) to every local and long distance trip within Sikkim, to every hotel that we stayed in, the trip was a disaster. The taxi drivers and every hotel manager complained that they had not received payment for our travel/stay, causing us delays in travel and check-ins. One of the taxi drivers was quite belligerent about not receiving his payment and made our trip to North Sikkim quite unpleasant. At Lachen in North Sikkim, we were sent details of one hotel and were actually taken to another one. It was a horrible place which looked like it was still under construction. We met another group there who was also complaining about mismanagement of their tour by YaknYeti. Our last halt at Cherry Village Resort, Darap was the worst. On the day before we were to catch our flight back from Bagdogra, to my great surprise, Satish emailed me, giving the actual cost of our trip as more than double of the initial amount quoted. What a shock that was! Never once before had he mentioned that the cost was going to change. At Cherry Village Resort, when we got ready to leave for our drive back to Bagdogra in the morning, the manager ( Mr Buddha, who seemed like a local goonda) and his goons locked our luggage in a room and would not let us leave saying that he had not received payment! Our taxi would not come to pick us up saying that the transport company had not received payment from Yak N Yeti. They asked us to pay Rs 29,500 by credit card (Rs 16,000 to Cherry Village Resort and Rs 13500 to the transport company) before they let us leave. We thought of going to the local police-station, but thought that we would miss our flight if we delayed. So we decided to pay the extra charges. The credit card machine was at Pelling and this caused further delay. On the way back, Satish Bardewa, who seems to have some connections with the transport department and the police, had our vehicle stopped at the border police check-post of Melli and further delayed us. We missed our flights because of these delays. We were exhausted when we reached Bagdogra and then had to re-book our flights for the next day and had to stay at a hotel in Bagdogra, incurring a huge extra cost. We have since then sent a legal notice to Satish Bardewa, who has not responded. We plan to take further legal action against Yak n Yeti.
Sikkim is a beautiful place and we had hoped to have a good vacation there. However, because of like Satish Bardewa of Yak n Yeti, we suffered throughout the trip and that has left a bad taste lingering on. It is now difficult for me to think of Sikkim without recollecting our bad experience with Yak n Yeti.
If you are reading this, then please do NOT book through Yak n Yeti travels. In retrospect, I think that we should not have booked through a trave
