Indian Online Airfare search: Comparative Analysis of 10 different travel sites.

Arun and all others
Great analysis! I live abroad in USA and visit my hometown in Kolkata once a year.
Now that there is no direct foreign airline from Europe to Kolkata (Lufthansa has left Kolkata), what are some of the NRI’s preferences for traveling to Kolkata? Just wanted to know.

AIR India is not a good choice for us. Air India takes us to Mumbai or Delhi around mid night and then we have to wait for another 5-6 hours to catch a flight to Kolkata. After traveling already 16-18 hours at that point, another 5-6 hours waiting seems unbearable.
Hope to hear from you with some positive info.

Hey Arun,

Any updates on this study since a lot has happened in the Indian OTA market over last couple of years !!
Hope you have / are planning to conduct another research on this – comparison of airlines / hotels / packages !?

Thanks

Here comes a very good travel search engine, http://www.nearhop.com
Salient features—

1. Fetches fares online from various service providers (kingfisher, jetAirways etc) sites. So the fares you see at nearhop are exactly the same as those you see in airlines sites.

2. Computes routes in combination with bus and trains.

3. Routes would be computed upto 3-hops.

4. Gives day specific schedules. ie some flight ‘X’ may depart at 3pm on sunday and depart at 4 pm on remaning days. Nearhop takes care of that and generates day specific schedules.

and more

Very useful information was found here, thank you for your work.

Very interesting comparison.  I wanted to let you know that we at Tripmela just launched Searchmela (www.searchmela.com) that allows you to compare airfares from multiple sites without having to do searches at each site.  It’s different from metasearch sites because you actually get the results on the online agency site itself — that means fewer clicks before purchase.  Check it out and see for yourself…

Thanks for such wonder place to to share my personal experience which i felt during my trip to jaipur. when i was unable to find any good hotels in jaipur then indiaprofile.com is website who provide me good jaipur hotels informations………i want to suggest if your willing to spend some days of your life in jaiour then click indiaprofile.com………….rest will leave on him…….

I Think on internet it is not easy to find trustable and reliable travel agent so it is good to us to find quality informations from here there is famous and reliable travel agent of kerala liberty india who provide neccassary informations to the travallers. who are planning to spend their holidays in kerala.

Hi Guys,

thanks for such informations i get lots information about the Online Travel agency without paying a single penny hahaha.

I am just kidding usually i use makemytrip.com for my flight and hotel bookings. I always get a comfort and good price. Customer service is too good they will be in touch with you from the day you made your reservation till you arrive back to ur place. they always ready to helpout their passenger any time. they having a 24*7 customer care with a tollfree number.

ha ha ah a
I just want to say if any body want to tell me abt makemytrip any bad or good exp i m ready to listen but as per my reccomandations you guys should go & try out makemytrip once

Hi Guys,

thanks for such informations i get lots information about the Online Travel agency without paying a single penny hahaha.

I am just kidding usually i use makemytrip.com for my flight and hotel bookings. I always get a comfort and good price. Customer service is too good they will be in touch with you from the day you made your reservation till you arrive back to ur place. they always ready to helpout their passenger any time. they having a 24*7 customer care with a tollfree number.

I just want to say if any body want to tell me abt makemytrip any bad or good exp i m ready to listen but as per my reccomandations you guys should go & try out makemytrip once

@Trak.in: I couldnt really understand the Scale that you have used to anayse the OTAs here. Like, what made you take a different scale size for every parameter? You could have taken a size of 10 on every parameter and that might had a much better demarcation. Just for instance, if I ask you what site is more user friendly among Yatra & Cleartrip, you definitely would point Cleartrip (If thats what you have mentioned quite a lot of times above) but surprisingly, you rate both of them at the same level!!

There are things that are not in the control of an OTA (like duration of the journey, Direct / Non stop/ Stop over flights between two destinations, Fare on a particular flight etc) as these areas are governed and managed by the airline. What we need to understand is that an OTAs job is to simplify the vast science behind the whole Travel procedure and this is achieved when an OTA is able to give solutions to a traveller’s problems.

In your analysis, you have time and again, pointed out that there is no direct flight offered between Pune and Jaipur. Now when no airline connects the two point s directly, you may not possibly expect an OTA to offer a direct connection unless it starts its own Airline :)

Secondly, the destinations covered can be taken as a parameter for criticallly analysing an OTA but again, almost all the OTAs are integrated with the GDSs and would serve all the operational destinations on the front end. This should not be a major part of analysis. I found all OTAs scoring 4 out of 5 in your analysis above. Does it make a difference if we do not include it? However, one thing that you may like to analyse is the no of airlines being served by a particular OTA. Like Indiatimes does not offer all the airlines even if they operate on a particular destination (e.g. Go Air). Makemytrip, earlier, did not offer Deccan and still does not offer Paramount which Yatra does. Sometimes Yatra does not offer Indian Airlines / Air India.
The quality of search is another parameter that labelled as User Friendliness, I guess, but you might further break it up into more quantitative parameters and a more descriptive analysis to justify your score card is needed on this end.
The solutions that an OTA offers to its customers and the User Friendliness are the only two criteria that you should ideally be analysing. Solutions would consider the Fare in proportion to Time Taken on a journey and you might take into consideration a new figure (like say Fare Hours per mile or something similar) If this value falls in a particular comfortable range then the deal is ideal. This might again vary from Business to Leisure travellers and you should even try to clearly draw a line between the two. May be cleartrip, on account of its high prices and more Fare Hours per mile is not that good for a leisure traveller but would suit best for a Business Traveller.

Also, you might want to mention the role of an Airline if you take Prices as a parameter here.

Yahoo Farechase & Sweet Fare.com are the other two Meta SEs in the travel space right now and with an expected MoM growth of more than 35% domestically, this space would keep getting crowded.

Dear Prashant,

Since you are from the travel trade, it is surprising to read your comment.

We are a travel search engine. iXiGO will NOT offer booking capabilities since our philosophy is to allow people to search and book directly on airline sites, thereby cutting out intermediaries. We wouldnt want to become an intermediary ourselves would we.

Secondly, iXiGO is an innovative product built by Travenues, a travel 2.0 technology company, and has rich intellectual property of its own, therefore, we are NOT whitelabels of anyone.

Cheers,
iXiGO Team

@Vishal

iXiGO shows airfares *only* directly from airlines, with taxes and fees included.

No caching, no timelag, no inaccurate taxes. The only reason a fare might not be available is that you were searching for a flight today or tomorrow and the seat is gone by the time you decided to book it.

Please refer to the legend on the bottom left of our results page to avoid the confusion you had with the routing via Mumbai that we offered for the Jaipur-Pune search. Most of our users dont mind clicking on 2-3 airline links if it saves them Rs. 3K :-)

Happy searching,
iXiGO team

The basis of this comparison is wrong. You cannot compare a meta search engine like ixigo to other normal travel portal as you would be transferred to the airline site once you select the booking. I did a search now and this is what i find myself into.

1. searched the same destination and got a cheap fare in ixigo. when i clicked on indian it takes me to the indian site and says sorry !!!….selected spicejet …takes me to spice jet site and gives me a one way fare to select while i have searched for a return. selected jetairways takes me to the jetairways site and shows me pune mumbai return while i wanted to book pune jaipur….

these are cached fares and not coming from the reservation engine…… ixigo is good for comparison and the UI is splendid…thanks… vishal ahuja

Good comparison. Perhaps you should also include over search site too in the comparison. We just released it on Aug 25

http://www.90di.com/travel
—
Release of 90DI Travel : http://www.90di.com/travel

India Travel search made easy!

Long distance travel in India has a very peculiar nature – a diversity of transport modes, which is very unique. Until very recently, trains was the only mode of transport used by the majority of people, with the national airline having a very few flights across only the larger cities. Though the Airline industry has been picking in the past few years, even today, number of airports in India are less than 100 where as number of train stations in India are well above 3000. The number of passengers traveling on train per day, far exceeds the number of passengers traveling by flight.

Most of the travel sites in India are primarily designed to support Air Travel. The official Train web site also does not provide comprehensive routing between any station to any other station.

90DI is a unique travel search site for finding travel related information in India. It does multi-modal routing to find the best routes across the Rail and Air routes. It supports routing over 3000 places in India, which either have a railway station or an airport or both. Its routing algorithm has brought access to hidden routes between places which only the frequent travelers between those routes, or the smart railway inquiry people know of.

Just as an example try searching for the following routes on http://www.90di.com/travel:

1) From Bikaner (BIKANER JN – BKN(S) , in north-west) to Chennai in the (south-east)

2) ALIGARH (in UP) to TRIVANDRUM (in Kerala)

3) Delhi to Mysore ( MYSORE JN – MYS(S))

And did we say, that you can see the routes displayed graphically in the India map! Just click on the ‘M’ shown on the route and see the route on the India map. It will also show all the stations you would cross as you travel by a specific route.

4) If above are some of the routes to demonstrate the unique routing 90DI does. At the same time it can also do the more conventional. Just try out routes between: Mumbai to Delhi

It also gets the latest seat availability and fare information in real-time, by connecting to the web sites of airlines and the Indian railways.

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Just wondering why you dropped Rediff FareSearch. They were the first travel search engine post the low budget airline circus that happened. (I could be wrong here)

I think they have a cool lowest 3 months fare graph feature and a recent addition is the air tickets for Rs 100. Got a ticket from Mumbai to Goa for Rs 0. The sight of a ticket at that price was awesome. Also saw abnormal prices of Rs. 0 and Rs 99 on Mumbai Bangalore/Hyderabad. Altho had to pay the govt 1425 as tax :(. But still couldnt stop from braggin to my family and frds about having gotten a Rs 0 ticket.

Hmm… well I kinda like the sms search feature of ixigo. You can get pricing and search results on the move, which although have not been of much use to me yet [ I’m a pretty planned sort of a guy :) ], but has come in handy for a couple of my friends who got stuck in a small town with no internet access. They searched, got he results, called the call center no. of the airline and WHAM! .. ticket got booked. :) . Small things like these goes to show the commitment of a company, as well as how progressive it is. ( Yeah okey sam, I’m a Big fan of iXiGo, but now you know why ;) )

I live overseas and travel to India often. For my domestic travel I have started to use ixigo. I’m not saying others are not good, as i have not used them, but just that ixigo is really good. One of the key reasons being I get to see all the options in front of me, can very easily adjust my departure and arrival times to see the results. But, one another important factor is that ixigo takes me to the airline website to book my tickets. This way I’m ensured of transparency and can tell the airline that even though I searched using a portal I bought my tickets at their website. In Europe, if you don’t get anything of your preference in the flight the airline company says that you had booked through an agent or a portal so they are responsible for your travel and vice versa by the portal.
There might be other websites that do what ixigo does, but having lived overseas for more than 10 years I do not know of many of these portals and end up going to each airline website and avoid travel search engines fearing I will have the same experience as I have when I book tickets here. ixigo, gives clear options, is very user friendly, makes sure your booking is transparent. I don’t think I will visit any other website (unless I have a bad experience with ixigo).

You’d prefer to sleep at the airport for 4hrs 45 minutes :-) then why take a flight?

It depends on whether I value 1500 Rs. more or 4 hours. Some of us might prefer to save 1500 Rs. so that we can sleep 4 more hours and enjoy that lavish five star dinner the next day :-)

Hi , I have been following your blog and i think you have been doing an brilliant job on tracking the OTAs :-)
However I’d like to bring to your notice that you have not taken into focus a very important point , that being the Duration of travel.
Cleartrip may show a different fare for now , but please note that travel duration is 4 hrs whilst Yatra shows a fare lower by only Rs 1500 approx with a 8hr 45 minutes travel time… Now as a consumer I’d rather pay and get to my destination faster instead of waiting, otherwise I’d simply take a train.. I am sure you’d agree with me.

Mobissimo ? What is that ? I work in a banglore software firm, and iXiGO is the most famous in that part. Yes I agree about Zoomtra. It’s nice , and should have been included in the survey coz that’s one of the initial pushers of this industry. But I’m a frequent flier and Zoomtra is nowhere close to the sophistication that iXiGO ppl have achieved. I did the exact same search which this blog did and came out with almost the same results. iXiGo does rock man… Trust me. And this is from a unbiased observer.

You seem to be connected to Ixigo in someway & this whole excercise seems to be a promotion for ixigo ;)) There is no other meta search featured in your comparative? where is zoomtra , mobissmo & likes which have been launched much before? No one knows ixigo.