How We Communicate With You

What we send, and why

Every message we send falls into one of two kinds, and only one of them needs your permission first.

This split matters more than it looks. Telecom operators in India route transactional traffic and promotional traffic on separate registered paths, and a message that blurs the two, an offer riding along with a booking confirmation, is exactly what gets a sender ID blocked or a WhatsApp number restricted. Keeping the two apart is not paperwork for its own sake: it is what lets your driver’s number reach you on the morning of your trip instead of being caught in a filter meant for someone else’s marketing.

Service and transactional messages

Your quotation with the fare and the vehicle it applies to, your booking confirmation once a trip is locked in, your driver’s name and mobile number with the vehicle’s make and class, a reminder ahead of pick-up, a note if a driver is running early or late, and your invoice once the trip is done. Every one of these follows directly from something you have already started with us: an enquiry, a booking, a trip already running. We send them whether or not you have agreed to anything else, because withholding them would mean withholding the service itself.

Promotional messages

A seasonal update ahead of the wedding season, an offer on a route you have used before, news of a new vehicle class, anything written to bring you back to book again rather than to run a trip you already have. None of this is necessary to a booking you may currently have with us, and none of it is sent unless you have separately told us you want to hear it. We would rather send nothing than send something you did not ask for.

The messages that sit in between

A request to rate your driver after a trip, or a short check that a booking went as planned. These follow from a specific trip you took rather than from an attempt to sell you the next one, so we treat them as service messages and do not hold them back for want of a marketing opt-in. If you would rather not receive even these, tell us and we will note it against your account.

Opting out of marketing never stops the messages you actually need. We will always send you your quotation, your booking confirmation, your driver and vehicle details, your trip reminders and your invoice, because those are necessary to perform the service you have booked.

Which category a message belongs to is decided by what it is for, not by which desk in our office happens to send it, and that is the whole point of keeping the two apart: so that a promotional experiment can never stand in the way of the confirmation that gets your car to you on time.

How we capture your consent

Where this website asks for your consent to promotional messages, it is a separate checkbox, left unticked by default, and it is never bundled with the action that submits your enquiry or your booking. Agreeing to be contacted about your trip is not the same thing as agreeing to hear about our offers, and we do not treat the two as one tick.

The reason we keep it separate is straightforward: so that asking us a question about your trip never quietly signs you up for anything else. If you have only ever filled the enquiry form to check a fare, or asked on a call whether we cover a particular route, you have not agreed to hear about an offer or a seasonal update, because nobody asked you to and you never ticked anything that said so. Submitting a booking is one decision. Agreeing to hear about future offers is a separate one, and treating them as the same tick is exactly the kind of default we do not use.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act sets the same standard this checkbox already meets: consent has to be freely given, specific to what it covers, and clearly informed, not assumed from a box that starts ticked or buried inside a longer form you were really filling in for another reason.

• You fill the enquiry form to ask about a fare or a route and leave the marketing checkbox unticked. You hear nothing from us beyond the answer to that enquiry.
• You tick the marketing checkbox while enquiring, and you may also receive an occasional update within the limits set out later on this page.
• You call our office directly. Nobody asks you to agree to marketing as a condition of getting a quotation.
• Your organisation holds a corporate account with us. See the section on corporate communications below for how that is treated differently.

You can withdraw that consent as easily as you gave it, and doing so needs no explanation, no letter and no phone call. The section below sets out exactly how, and how fast we act on it.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is our primary channel for a practical reason rather than a preference. It reaches you directly, on the phone already in your hand, instead of getting lost among unread emails or filtered by a network that treats every SMS from an unfamiliar sender as suspect. It also gives you something a phone call cannot: a written record. Your driver’s name, his mobile number, the vehicle’s registration and class, and the pick-up time are all things you may want to check again an hour before the car arrives, and a chat thread you can scroll back to serves that better than something you were told once down a phone line.

Our only WhatsApp number is +91 99966 69190, the same number published for calls. We run no other WhatsApp presence: if a message claiming to be from Om Travels arrives on a different number, it is not us. Every WhatsApp link on this website opens a conversation on that number through our own redirect, so the number in your chat should always match the one printed here and in our footer.

A service message on WhatsApp, your quotation, your booking confirmation, your driver’s number, needs no opt-in from you: it is how we run your trip. A business-initiated marketing message on WhatsApp is different and needs your separate opt-in, the same as an SMS or an email. You can opt out of WhatsApp marketing at any time by replying STOP to the conversation.

This boundary is enforced on the sending side as well as on this page. WhatsApp’s own rules for businesses require a template used for a booking update to be approved for exactly that purpose, so it cannot be repurposed to carry an offer.

Because WhatsApp is where we send you something as sensitive as a driver’s mobile number, it is also a channel someone impersonating us is likely to misuse. We will never ask you for an OTP, a card number or a bank transfer over WhatsApp, and a message that does is not from us, whatever name or photograph it carries. See the last section on this page for what to do if that happens to you.

How to opt out

Opt-out is honoured within 24 hours. Reply STOP on WhatsApp or SMS, use the one-click unsubscribe in any email, or write to us directly.

Write to us at info@om-travels.in if you would rather email than message, and we treat it as an opt-out from every promotional channel, not only the one you wrote from.

• Your number or address is added to our internal suppression list within 24 hours of your request, and no further promotional message goes out to it on any channel.
• A message already queued to send before your request reaches us is not recalled mid-flight, but nothing further is scheduled after it.
• Service and transactional messages continue exactly as before: your quotation, your booking confirmation, your driver’s details, your trip reminders and your invoice. Opting out of marketing does not opt you out of hearing that your car is on its way.
• If you enquire or book again after opting out, the marketing checkbox starts unticked, the same as it would for anyone else. Being a returning customer does not put you back on a list you asked to leave.
• You can opt back in at any time, the same way you opted in the first time: a ticked checkbox, or a clear request to us.

Where your organisation holds a corporate account with us, an individual traveller opting out of marketing has no effect on the duty confirmations, invoices and trip queries that follow from the account itself. Those are covered separately in the section below.

For a one-glance summary of what you currently receive from us and how to change any of it, see /preferences.

Quiet hours

A promotional message that lands in the middle of the night is unwelcome whatever it says, so we keep them to hours nobody would mind hearing from us.

TRAI’s own rules for commercial communication rest on the same idea, and we would rather follow that principle as a matter of course than find out how strictly it is enforced.

We send a small number of promotional messages, never as a flood, and none outside reasonable hours.

This is about promotional messages only. An operational or safety message, your driver’s number the evening before an early flight, a delay on the road, reaches you at whatever hour it is true, because holding it back until morning would defeat the point of sending it.

In practice this rarely becomes a live question. A booking confirmation or a driver’s number is sent when the trip actually needs it, and most trips are booked and briefed well within an ordinary day. Where a trip genuinely starts at three in the morning, an airport run booked the night before, that is when the message that matters arrives, because that is the hour it is true.

Call recording

A call to or from our office, inbound or outbound, may be recorded. We use the recording for quality and training, and to settle a dispute about what was said or agreed, including a fare quoted over the phone.

Both reasons exist for your protection as much as for ours. Quality and training catches a badly handled call before it becomes a pattern. Settling a dispute fairly matters because a fare quoted over the phone, a pick-up address given verbally, or a change agreed on a call rather than in writing are exactly the moments where two people can honestly remember a conversation differently, and a recording settles the question with what was actually said rather than with whoever argues more confidently afterwards.

• Confirming a fare or an itinerary agreed verbally, where the quotation sent afterwards is questioned.
• Reviewing how an urgent request or a complaint was handled, as part of our own quality process.
• Training staff on how a call should be handled, using real calls with identifying details removed where a call is used for training rather than for a specific dispute.
• Establishing what was actually said where a customer or a driver raises a dispute about an instruction given over the phone.

We do not publish a fixed retention period for recordings. Instead, the commitment we make is a purpose-based one: a recording is kept only for as long as one of the reasons above is still live, and not after.

A recording is personal data under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act like any other record we hold about you, and it is treated with the same care. Access is limited to people who need it for one of the purposes above, it is not shared outside the office, and it is not put to any use beyond them. If a call is central to a dispute you have raised with us, our Grievance Officer can arrange for the relevant recording to be reviewed as part of resolving it.

Corporate and business communications

Where your organisation has a running transport agreement with us, the messages that follow from it, a duty confirmation, an invoice, a query about an upcoming trip, are business communications made under that contract. They are not unsolicited commercial communication under the TRAI framework, and they continue whether or not an individual traveller at your organisation has separately opted in to our consumer marketing.

The distinction TRAI actually draws is not about whose phone the message lands on. It is about whether an existing commercial relationship already covers the reason for the message. A duty confirmation or an invoice sent because your organisation has a running transport agreement with us falls inside that relationship, in the same way a bank telling you a cheque has cleared is not treated as marketing. It becomes a marketing question only when we write to sell something beyond what the agreement already covers, an upgrade, a new route, a seasonal offer, and at that point the individual traveller’s own opt-in, or the absence of one, governs exactly as it would for any other customer.

• A duty confirmation for a trip already scheduled under your agreement.
• An invoice or a statement of account for trips run in a billing period.
• A query from us about an upcoming trip on your account: timing, a change of vehicle, a pick-up point.
• An offer to add a route or a vehicle class beyond what your agreement covers, which is marketing and needs the same opt-in as it would for any other customer.

Where an individual traveller at your organisation also wants to hear from us personally, about fares for their own future travel, say, that is a separate opt-in from the corporate agreement itself, and withdrawing it has no bearing on the organisation’s own account or the duty communications that keep it running.

If a message claims to be us and is not

We only ever contact you from the channels published on this page and in our footer: +91 99966 69190 for calls and WhatsApp, and an address ending @om-travels.in for email. A message asking you to pay into a different account, click an unfamiliar link, or share an OTP is not from us, whatever name it uses.

Impersonation is a real risk in this trade rather than a theoretical one. A chauffeur-hire booking involves a fare, an itinerary and often a driver’s mobile number changing hands over WhatsApp and SMS, which is exactly the kind of exchange someone can try to insert themselves into: a fake message that your driver is delayed and needs the balance paid to a different account, a link claiming to reschedule your booking that actually collects your card details, a call claiming to be our office asking you to read out an OTP. None of it needs your account to be compromised. It only needs someone to know a car is booked, which is often visible from nothing more than a public review or a conversation overheard at a pick-up point.

• A request to pay into an account other than the one on your invoice.
• A link asking for your card details, your net banking login or an OTP.
• Urgency that does not match how we actually work: a demand to act within minutes, a threat that your booking will be cancelled if you do not respond immediately.
• A number or an email address that looks close to ours but is not exact, one digit different, or a similar-looking domain instead of @om-travels.in.

Report it at /trust/report-fraud, so we can warn other customers and, where it is serious enough, take it further ourselves. We look into every report: whether the number or address involved is one we can trace, whether other customers have flagged the same message, and whether it is serious enough to go beyond our own customers, to the telecom operator concerned or to the police. None of that depends on you having already lost anything. The earliest report is the one that protects the next customer.