by Arun Prabhudesai 
iXiGO, an Indian travel aggregator has announced the launch of its hotel search engine, a natural progression for their travel search.
As per the press release, ixigo hotel search engine can search and book accommodation in real time across 4500 hotels in 320 Indian cities.
XiGO’s hotel search accesses more than 30 leading national and international hotel booking websites, enabling comparisons of room tariffs of the same hotel across multiple sites within a few seconds. The hotel search engine sorts accommodation by price, star ratings, amenities and allows detailed views for maps and photos; all in a single webpage. An instant keyword search on names, addresses and filters on best value within hotels narrows down the search – features so far restricted to only select international travel portals.
I tried doing couple of searches for hotels in Bangalore and results were decent enough. Being purely a search engine, the visitors will have to visit the parent hotel booking site to do the booking.
April 9, 2008 Continue Reading → by Arun Prabhudesai 
Last year I did a comparison of 10 OTA’s operating in India. The comparison was done based on 5 different parameters like Ticket fares, Flight options, Destinations, User Friendliness and value added services. In that comparison IXIGO scored quite well on most aspects including user friendliness. Cleartrip and Yatra also got good points on user friendliness aspect.
However, in a recent survey conducted by Juxtconsult, Cleartrip seems to have taken a lead over other OTA rivals in terms of user friendliness. The JuxtConsult survey conducted on the online travel portals involved most of the leading players in the OTA category – Cleartrip, Makemytrip, Yatra, Travelguru and Indiatimes Travel (surprisingly IXIGO was not included in the survey). To measure the ‘Website User-Friendliness’ Index, respondents were asked to rate the travel portals on 19 distinct parameters under 4 categories: ease of access, design appeal, ease of usage and usage satisfaction.
Cleartrip came out the winner in their research.
March 19, 2008 Continue Reading → 
