Indian OTAs (Online travel agents) are in news again. With more than 75% of e-commerce spend happening purely on online travel booking, this space is getting quite lucrative.
With the number of Online Travel agents reaching double figures, it is quite competitive too. To move ahead of the competition, ClearTrip, Yatra and IXIGO have come up with new features to attract more audience.
IXIGO has introduced a new feature that will allow the users to search comparative rates among the major players – Yatra, Cleartrip and MakeMyTrip. The users have to simply click the three checkboxes while searching for the airfares on IXIGO itself. This is an excellent feature, at the same time quite risky. IXIGO seems to be quite confident about their search results being the lowest, otherwise this feature is sure to backfire.
This feature is quite appealing as the users do not have to go through different portals to carry out same search. Quite a time saver!
Cleartrip on the other hand has launched Cleartrip graphs that provide users with indicative prices across range of dates for 9 different airlines. This will help users to find the cheapest fare rates across different carriers.
This feature will surely be useful to users who are flexible on dates and ready to adjust their trips according to rate fluctuation.
On the other hand, Yatra has taken the brick and mortar franchisee route to spread its wings. Yatra has tied up with Sify Technologies to increase the penetration of its travel related services. As per the alliance, the Sify retail points would offer Yatra.Com’s travel services with an integrated cash acceptance model. Consumers can book all domestic airlines tickets with instant confirmations, hotels and resorts by paying cash over the Sify counters, the company said in a release.This will give them access to thousands of potential users in smaller cities and non-metros, who are still not comfortable with Internet transactions.
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
Yatra.com are corporate thieves, they have an institutional policy of lying to customers and screening calls from those they rip off. Yatra supplied me with a non-refundable ticket – a day after I purchased the ticket in cash from one of their ‘ couriers’ who told me it would be electronically issued the same day. The next day the tickets were signed for by an illiterate hotel clerk, at the wrong address value = 300u$d.
Now, if nonrefundable documents which equal 300U$D were issued to the wrong address and signed for by the wrong person, you would think that Yatra customer service would do the right thing and re-issue. Customer service(three different managers) would lie to me and tell me the wrong information, promised call backs never came and I spent hours on the phone trying to reach Yatra.com but they screened my number, not until I switched phone numbers did I reach them and not until I went to the office in person did they finally promise me a refund.
This refund was never given, now they are lying telling me I claimed it. This company has institutionalized thievery as an agenda, be warned.
Challenging role in a startup:
———————————-
We are running http://www.samfra.com – a local search engine.
We are going to launch a travel portal with great innovations.
We already have some highly experienced people in the team.
But, we need experienced people from travel, web marketing and technical
domains.
If interested or you know someone who can be suitable, send me a mail at
jeet232(at)gmail(dot)com
Even if you are not in above categories, still we can discuss things.
Thanks
Jeet Singh
9342141022
i love ixigo for its speed but not for its results. They tend to be , more often than not, more expensive. I believe this particular feature has come down from the site now post one of the portals asking it to be…