Airtel Recharge Anywhere is not exactly smooth for some people

I am an Airtel Prepaid customer since some time and rarely use the roaming facility as I rarely go out of town. So I was a bit clueless about Airtel’s recharge anywhere scheme. I went to Gurgaon yesterday and was running out of talk time. So, thought of using the service which is supposed to make recharging your prepaid sim cards simple!

Well, mark my word and don’t enter a shop where you see a Bihari looking guy instead of the actual owner. As they actually don’t have any idea about what you are talking about when you are in fact talking about the customer support of the company they are a dealer off. And be very careful to mention that you are a roaming customer or not because he will not ask you that and will bring out a coupon with the speed of a jet and scratch the silver covering with such precise skills as if he is going to win a lakh rupees from that coupon. And no, he would not understand that you are on roaming even when you told him that the phone is using Hutch services instead of the parent company Airtel.

The thing is that Airtel has now two ways to recharge prepaid coupons. One is the tradition coupon system and another is through a special sim card provided to the dealers. Roaming phones can only be recharged using the sim and not from the coupons (Now I know that!). And you cannot be sure that the guy sitting on the counter knows that. Because common sense explains, he should at least check the phone number to see what way to recharge it. Same thing happened with me. Mine was a roaming one and the stupid Bihari guy opened the local phones only coupon for a thousand bucks and later found out that it was unable to work on my sim. Luckily the owner of the shop was a nice cool guy (who entered in the picture a bit later) and not a frustrated old man who accepted that the mistake was on both sides (same thing had happened with his Bihari employee before!) and did not argue much and took the unused but scratched coupon back. He also told me that the sim card worked with local mobile phones too. Coupons were still being used for convenience sake. Stupid thing on behalf of the Airtel Company. They don’t inform about this stupid loophole in the advertisements and I bet many other people have been stuck in a similar situation but maybe with less friendly Airtel dealers.

So, was I able to recharge my sim in the end? No, I could not as that guy found Airtel online recharge system to be down at that time. So, recharge anywhere is not as convenient as the Shah Rukh Khan ads make you believe!

Update: I did some googling on this and came out with this thing. There do exists recharge anywhere coupons but apparently the guy I visited did not have them. So, my advice is… avoid small shops, make clear where the mobile number actually is from and make sure the dealer knows what he is doing!