A private consultant in Hyderabad was in for a shock after his trip to Nizamabad via an Ola cab, came up to Rs 9 lakh.
On August 24, Rathish Sekhar reportedly left for Nizamabad in the morning and came back in the evening on the same day.
Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Rathish said "When I booked the cab the estimate shown on my phone was about Rs 5,000. When I actually returned, the bill showed Rs 9.15 lakh..There were no dots between the numericals. For example, some times the bill amount is displayed as ‘9158.87’ which would mean Rs 9,158. But even Rs 9,000 would be almost double the estimate"
The DC report adds that while he had travelled around 450 km, the trip showed the distance travelled as 85,427 km.
After a call to Ola, the final bill was recalculated to Rs 4,812. The company has apologized for the incident and said that it was a computer error.
Ola cabs recently faced the anger of residents in the city after it started charging four to five times more than the normal fare when heavy rains lashed Hyderabad on Wednesday morning, in the time of crisis.
Both Uber and Ola, used surge pricing to shoot up rates during the rain, with many customers cancelling their trip after the estimate cost showed numbers in the thousands.
Telangana transport minister P. Mahender Reddy told DC that the government would soon control the fares of even app-based cab services like Ola and Uber.