Leaving the heavy monsoon of Bangalore behind me, I just arrived in Munich where I am happily looking forward to a dense and exciting weekdend. Saturday 12.00 pm start of the famous Munich Oktoberfest, in the afternoon marriage of a good friend of mine and Sunday lunch (again on the Oktoberfest :-) with Robert Wuttke, founder and CEO of the international online match-making service Be2 .
Yesterday I bought my ticket for Bangalore-Maldives-Bangalore in mid November with a new travel agent after firing my old one due to repeated indolence and non-responsiveness (see also my post from Tuesday). The new one is doing a lot of corporate travel and seems to be an insider in the industry for 17 years where he shared some interesting insights with me which I just repeat at this place without having double-checked them: My regular "shuttle" Frankfurt-Bangalore-Frankfurt seems to be the most profitable for Lufthansa in its entire network, displacing so far Frankfurt-San Francisco-Frankfurt.
I told him about my annoyance that it was for approximately one year no longer possible to book on the e.g. excellent website of JetAirways with a non-Indian credit card for a domestic flight. He confirmed that the rules have been changed after for instance JetAirways has allegedly lost around € 15 Mio. on fraudulent bookings. The agent told me that he and his agency were daily targets of purchase requests for 100 tickets mostly from obscure African prospects which would be settled by credit card. He rejects them all, especially as the credit card companies issue warnings on a regular bases to do so. Even more so as the risk has been shifted to the vendor: In case the credit card turns out to be a fraud, the seller has to return the money but has sold the service.
The latter seems quite in tune with an article that I read about a real mafia which has built up worldwide and which collects and sells forfeited credit cards in bulk. I also realized the same that increasingly when I travel and have some expense with my credit card, my bank would call me on my mobile within half an hour to verify if it was really me. So far, knock on wood, consistently: yes.
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