Travel Portal Slammed For Sending Trip Notification To Flyer’s Entire Contact List

In a world where more and more people are using apps for booking hotels and flights, such service portals often trick people into giving ‘consent’ for sharing their data such as contact lists. The booking portals then use this contact list to advertise and spam their offers. Recently, an X user Akash called out the popular booking portal Goibibo for spamming his contact list with an ‘offer’ that also informed him that he had finished a trip. One of Akash’s friends sent him this message that infuriated him. In a scathing post, Akash shared the screenshot of the Goibibo message.

While tagging the company, Akash wrote, “How can you send SMS about me completing a trip to my phone contacts? Are you out of your mind? I never gave you explicit consent to do this and I will never do this. This is spamming and breach of privacy!”

This post soon gathered hundreds of likes. In a follow-up post, Akash shared a conversation he had with a Goibibo customer care staff. The Goibino team member told him to “install the app and disable (unsync) the sync feature” that allows the company to access his contact list, but when Akash tried to do that he realised that the permission was not given from his end in the first place.

He added, “In second follow up call when I told this, they said our backend team has disabled it yesterday for you!” The company assured me that they would “try taking down the feature completely or improve it in a certain way that it won’t hamper the privacy of the users”. Akash also clarified, “BTW, I uninstalled the app for more than 6 months ago, and they introduced this feature after that I believe. So there was no explicit consent from my side for the feature. I wish they just kill the feature and rethink from scratch!”

Commenting on this post, an X user wrote, “Now imagine someone you don’t know all that well gets to know you’re not in town and tries to rob the place.” Another person wrote, “They are doing this for years. Other day one of my Friends was Travelling for a Surprise and his wife got a message.”

Many people mentioned that because of such spam and privacy breaches, they have stopped using apps. Making this point, an X user wrote, “I never use mobile apps for flight bookings. I book on the browser and then use airline apps to track the ticket. After seeing this, I am never gonna download airline ticket booking apps ever again.”