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.
Over last few months Cleartrip has grown quite aggressively. They have also secured big round of funding ($18.5 million) that they will be utilizing to spread their wings offline, by opening up branches all over India.
Here is Cleartrip’s founder Hrush Bhatt’s interview on their future plans. Courtesy: WATshow
Although I do not believe Alexa rankings (My blog ranking has dropped over last 3 months even though the blog traffic is constantly increasing), I did a small comparison just to get an idea on how various Indian OTA’s are placed.
Yatra seems to be heading the race and Cleartrip coming in at second. I am surprised that IXIGO is reeling at the bottom.
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Author: Arun Prabhudesai
Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.Related posts:
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Hey Arun.. Thanks so much for the mention of WATShow. Do check out the other shows as well. We have some really great people on the show. Would love your feedback on the show as well. We are trying our best to bring the best from the world of WAT (Web, Advertising & Technology) and support in the form of this post really helps! Thanks a ton!
As far as I know, Cleartrip has a much stronger technical team, so you can expect them to release a better product. Though it seems that everyone is now going offline to get bulk of their revenue. ixigo has not yet spent money to popularize their services. In usability they seems to be at the top and cleartrip is the only one comparable to them.
Hey Rajiv…I always enjoy WATshows…keep up the good work. Let more videos roll on :)
Abhishek, I agree with you completely. I love IXIGO’s UI for sure, however, they have not kept the pace and Cleartrip has taken quite a bit of lead over last few months (correct me if I am wrong, my observation is purely based on Alexa and it could be misleading). Going offline is probably the best way for expansion given that large chunk of Indians still rely on traditional medium of ticket booking.
Cleartrip is clearly the google of India. These guys are great at their technology .I love their UI and I am so happy that they got voted no.1.. they truly desrver it. No bling bling in the face which is so much more comforting while booking my tickets instead of those horrible distractions. I am sure now other travel portals will try and ape them.. Like yatra did. Yatra blantly copied their Calendar…lack of innovation will surely let Yatra down soon.
Thanks a lot for quoting us.
This user survey involved usage of the home page & perform at least one task on the site as an eye-frame of our questionnaire. People who spent less than 3 minutes on home page or 5 minutes in performing a task were not considered for the feedback. Moreover every website was evaluated by at least 240 “users of the site” and “none-users of the site but category users”. Therefore quite an expensive methodology :-) Hence we just considered the top five websites (most preferred by users) for evaluation.
This study is not only about usability but covers the complete user-friendliness aspects and gives business a quarterly feedback.
Mrutyunjay
Co-founder
JuxtConsult
As I understand, IXIGO and Cleartrip don’t fall into same category. While Cleartrip is more or less a proper OTA, IXIGO can only be termed as “Flight Search Engine”. At least this is the situation as of now.
On this basis, I think the exclusion of IXIGO from the survey is justified.
Nice informative article. It will be nice if you can also publish this piece of information in SiliconIndia.com as I am a member of SiliconIndia I am sure that this information will be useful for most of the members. http://www.siliconindia.com/register.php?id=T49I1Fh5
The traveler would certainly enjoy his stay in Fortune amidst all the facilities and would not look in for any other option in future. The starting price of the rooms in Pune is Rs 8000/-, Navi Mumbai is Rs 8500/-, and Kolkata is Rs 6000/-, visit http://www.fortunehotels.in/spl_offers.aspx
Cleartrip is a clean site. But in terms of costs/prices of services Ezeego1 (www.ezeego1.co.in) does score really well.