BENGALURU: With an increasing number of people becoming reliant on aggregators for everything — from shopping for groceries to hiring a taxi — the growth of aggregators in the adventure sports space comes as no big surprise. However, when it comes to bad experiences, travel aggregators restrict their responsibility to only booking the holiday for the customers and do not guarantee safety.
This is apparent in Thrillophilia’s response to a query by The New Indian Express about Sunday’s incident in which a woman, who had booked a trip through the website for an adventure camp, fell after a rope snapped during a sport.
In their response, the Thrillophilia’s website said, “We provide operators a technology platform to bring their activities and tours online. We facilitate payment transactions for them... We are not an activity provider or a tour operator for any of these tours. Nor are we a government body to check safety standards and approve or disapprove them.”
The company pointed out that the same camp site advertised with other platforms as well. “As the incident came to our notice, our customer team has been in constant touch with Divyansh Gupta and we have taken action supporting him. We have de-listed the camp site and have cancelled all future bookings with it,” a statement said.
Many say this is too little. Siddhartha Prakash, a resident of Electronics City said, “Cancelling of bookings and de-listing does not help the injured. I think the responsibility lies both with the aggregator as well as the customer. Never trust small camps or low-priced ones. While the deal might be good, the risks are higher.”
One method of predicting if an adventure company is any good is by user reviews. However, even these are not 100 per cent reliable. “There are so negative reviews for camp sites we love. The online reviews just can’t be taken at face value. It requires research,” said Trisha M, who frequently goes river rafting.
Past incidents
October 2017
A college student drowns after slipping from a rock near a waterfall 2km from Nandi Hills in Chikkaballapur
July 2016
11 software engineers who went to Savandurga had to be rescued after they lost their way while going up
July 2015
Government bans trekking near Dudhsagar falls after three people were feared to have been washed away in the waterfall