[Day 4] Aggressive selling 101

Here’s a new aggressive sales technique I learned today: go to your “victim” his hotel, get him out of bed, and then try to make him agree to things while he’s still half asleep.

That’s exactly what happened to me this morning. The agent showed up at my doorstep to explain in vague sentences why he is trustworthy. A typical thing for honest people to do… Of course, this only helped reinforce my belief that he’s scamming me. He also came to tell me certain parts of tour would have to be changed, because trains don’t ride at any given date. This time I was prepared for his tactics though and held off, promising to return to his office later during the day. I really didn’t want to go on this tour anymore.

At this point, I basically got a little paranoid, because it seemed everyone I met on the street was working together and trying to scam me in various ways. I let Akanksha know and she invited me over to her place in Chhatarpur in South Delhi.

The rest of the day, A. and her brother Sunny (not the one from the hotel) tried to help me get my money reimbursed. It turned out that the travel agent did in fact need all the money, because he had booked me into fancy hotels from which he would get lots of commission.

Luckily, Sunny is a well connected PR agent and A.’s father used to work for the Ministry of Defense, so they promised to “destroy” the agent if he didn’t reimburse me. Unfortunately there was some legalese I had signed, so he was only going to give back 50%. Since the bank couldn’t help me out, that was the best we could do. Better than nothing… We agreed to go visit him tomorrow.

The rest of the day passed quickly while I did some new planning. I’ll spend Holi with A.’s family and then head south to Aurangabad, the jumping off point for Elora and Ajanta. So again no visits to the city. In the evening, I had a very nice family dinner and went to a nice, quiet market to get some clothes for Holi.

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Sunny, Akanksha's brother, checking out colored powders for Holi.

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