DISQUS

Sam · 2 years ago

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.

satyendra · 2 years ago

I search http://www.zoomtra.com for this option but i could not find any option below Rs 12610.

Chetan · 2 years ago

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.

Amit · 2 years ago

HI Guys ,
I also compaired all the sites mentioned in the above. but i guess you are right i found ixigo to be the best in terms of pricing. the other sites took ages to open. it gave me prices listed on other portals ... so also did a check on the same , but was true . I also visited zoomztra and thats in german language and the other on mobissmo is not for the indian market. i clicked the link for tickets for the indin market and it openned up a page which was make my trip .

Nina · 2 years ago

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.

qwqw · 2 years ago

This is complete nonsense. IXIGo is very different from all others.

Shows you have your basics wrong.

Sameer · 2 years ago

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 :-)

trakin · 2 years ago

@Sam, Thanks for your comment. Just for Info, I am in no way connected to any of the above mentioned Travel search engines, neither am I paid in any way, neither do I know any one personally from any above search engines. Having said that I sure missed out on Zoomtra, and I knew about them. Maybe I will publish an update to this. Like I said, this space is getting too crowded and it is easy to miss out....However, I did not know about Mobissmo.
@Satyendra, thanks for the update on pricing of Zoomtra
@Chetan, certain travel search engines are more known in certain parts and segment. So it is difficult for one person to know all of them.
@Nina, I agree with the importance of travel time and If you read I did have mentioned that.

The good part however about the options given was that you did not have to change airlines and the travel time both ways was less than 5 hours, which was excellent and none of the previous sites had offered.

However, what I like more about clear trip was its simplicity and usability. It is very easy on eyes...good work on UI part...I am a usability freak...as you may know from my blog...
Thanks qwqw for letting me know that it is complete nonsense, I appreciate your honesty :)
@Sameer, very well said. Sometimes even an hour is important. For e.g. If you have a Business meeting and cannot afford to get late, you will even pay Rs. 10k more to reach on time...
Thanks everyone for your comments...

Nina · 2 years ago

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

Sameer · 2 years ago

Thanks Trak.in

Nina - The fact is that as a consumer, I want to see all the choice on a travel site - for both kind of users - who value time AS WELL as the ones who value money.

Cleartrip, for example, clearly seems to be catering only to the consumers who value time, and have an abundance of money. What else explains a price difference of over 6000 Rs. with some other sites mentioned ??

PR · 2 years ago

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).

Nina · 2 years ago

http://www.makemytrip.co.in/makemytrip/selectRe...
As of now I am getting a fare amount of Grand Total Rs. 13770 so where is the 6 k margin ??
And I'd like to add very non friendly user interface... extremely confusing!!

Chetan · 2 years ago

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 ;) )

Sameer · 2 years ago

Nina - That link doesn't work.

I tried 5-6 more searches. Cleartrip almost ALWAYS has the most expensive tickets. Is that the price consumers have to pay for a friendly user interface :-) ?

Sunny · 2 years ago

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.

trakin · 2 years ago

Sunny,
Thanks for your comment. It is amazing the amount of competition we have in this sector. Even after comparing 10 travel search engines, I guess there are at-least 3 more that I should have considered.
1) Rediff Airfare search
2) Zoomtra
3) Mobissmo

and believe me I must have missed atleast 3 others....Next month there will be another update...so stay tuned...

Having said that, I would like to say that out of all these very few actually will survive in longer run. The ones who will top on simplicity and prices (with consistency and across all sectors) will be ones we should watch out for....

Khushnood Naqvi · 2 years ago

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

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

--

Daytripper · 2 years ago

Great blog. Being a regular user of OTA's i prefer Yatra.com. Although most of my journies are point to point so i have not had issues with them. But after reading this blog i decided to try multi point search and found Makemytrip to have the best connection and fares but once you go to the next step i found most of the time the fares changed on thier site. ixigo does have a good UI but its only a metasearch which means they redirected me to the other OTA sites to do the booking. The reason i have nver booked from ixigo is because they are not showing all the OTS's. They also miss out on all the deals which likes of yatra and cleartrip provide with giving discounts using different credit cards. On yatra they always have a deal with some credit card provider. I have credit cards from most banks now as i can save a lot on my travel.. Maybe ixigo can set up a metasearch engine on different credit cards offers ... :)

Vishal Ahuja · 2 years ago

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

Sameer · 2 years ago

Hi,
This was nice analysis. You did a great job. keep it up. If u are planning to work upon next analysis than i would please request you to take one common metro sector as all the travel portals show enough number of flights for common secotr eg. mum-del. Also if possible i would request you to add the time taken by OTA's to search the options.
With regards to your search I was not able to fine 6.5k fare on Makemytrip.com where as whn i proceed for the booking they were asking me to pay some thing more than 14k.
Anyways fares on Arzoo, yatra, ixigo, cleartrip were ok.
Rest other sites were dull.
Bye and have a nice time.
Sameer.

iXiGO Team · 2 years ago

@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

Prashant · 2 years ago

Good job of doing the comparison....
I am from the travel trade and we ourselves are into developing OTA portals....ixigo.com seems to be a whitelabel of www.dohop.com....however they do a good job of scourging all the airline websites and display the available fare on the airline website. Looks like they have done a Beta launch of their website and would soon start offering booking capabilities on their website...whenever that happens....this site would rock...
If you want a comprehensive page views, hits, accessibility of OTA's then take a look at www.alexa.com it also gives the ranking of the website...

iXiGO Team · 2 years ago

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

Bhaskar · 2 years ago

Dear Prashanth and iXiGO team,

I checked the filghts from Chennai to Pune for the 27 Oct 2007.  Though there is direct non-stop flight of Spicejet, iXiGO showed only the Jet Airways flight.

Could you check this out.

Thanks

Ixigoteam · 2 years ago

Dear Bhaskar,
Thanks for your note. Sometimes, some result may not get displayed if the supplier website fails to respond (we as you may have seen, display results in real time as they are fetched). If you try after some time, or for a different date, then you should get the results you are looking for. FYI, we just tried the same search and got the desired result.
You can check it out here
We look forward to your continued support.
Thanks, Team iXiGO

Sandor · 2 years ago

Dear Trakin,

You may want to have a look at Sprice.co.in. Sprice is an international travel search engine, with a specific site for India, searching domestic -and- international airfares and hotels.

Thanks,
Sandor

Shadab Malik · 2 years ago

@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.

trakin · 2 years ago

Shadab,
Thank you for your insightful comment and analysis. To answer your first question, the scale for different parameter was based on the importance...the most importance I gave was to the fare pricing, and that is what is true in the real world. Obviously, I cannot have prices and other services at 10 points each...that would be unfair....what is the most important aspect for an OTA...get the cheapest flight...period !

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.

.
Yes I agree...but that is where the algorithms of finding the cheapest flight comes into picture....if that was not the case..all of the OTAs would have given the same pricing...
I agree with you that if airline does not have a direct flight, obviously they cannot show it...
I agree with you about analysing it further in detail, but my main aim for this post was to find out who are the OTA's who offer cheap flights and are userfriendly...I did add couple of parameters, but you also got to think about the time factor :)
Infact, there are atleast 5-6 more who have launched their meta search engines since I did this..
Yahoo FareChase
Zoomtra (I missed on them...I should have included them in this analysis)
Sweetfare
sprice.co.in (one of the commentators mentioned about this)
Indoflights.com
90DI

I am sure there will be more that I am not aware of....My mind boggles thinking about the players in this space. This has to consolidate as we move forward...

Dinesh · 2 years ago

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

Jaspreet Singh · 2 years ago

Booking Id: TGU0000024695

Cheating ka guru-Travelguru

I would want others to stay away from travelguru as I have had a really bad experience. I had booked a hotel through travelguru for Dec 22-Dec 25 in Sarovar Portico, Manali. Due to some unforseen circumstances, I had to cancel my booking on 15th Dec. As per the booking voucher, I was supposed to get refund - deduction of one nights room and taxes. However, I was shocked to see the cancellation voucher which I recieved which mentions that the refund amount is zero. So, travelguru has very cleverly cancelled my booking and refunded me zero amount.

Incase you want to book over the telephone, your call would be connected instantly to a customer care executive. God forbid if you want to cancel your booking over the telephone. You would be lucky if your call gets connected in 45 minutes and you get to talk to a customer care executive. All you hear is a executive coming on the line every 10 minutes saying that the systems are running a bit slow.

Overall a very bad experience.

srikanth sura · 1 year ago

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

India Tour Operator · 1 year ago

Thanks for the information. There is always need of good and reliable travel agents and tour operators for tours in India. India being a very popular tourist destination all over the world, India tour packages are in great demand.

Kerala India Travel · 1 year ago

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.

Danny boy · 1 year ago

Great comparison and overall a good job
although your analysis doesn't fully reflect the real picture..that MMT & Yatra are the main players in the market...

I'm in the GDS business...and the fastest growing OTA is albiontravels

thanks
keep up the good work

Jaipur Hotels Agent · 1 year ago

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.......

Apartments · 1 year ago

Every site is different and unique in their own way. Everyone tries to have some unique feature to be different from others. All the sites listed here are good and every user have different perspective while searching for a flight or a hotel and thery the users may vary for all these sites. Some may like cleartrip, some MMT some yatra, some zoomtra for one or the other reason like the prices, visiblity or UI, load time, search results etc. One thing I agree with some of the users who have made comments here that it is not fair to do comparison between meta search engines and simple travel portals.

Jared Blank · 1 year ago

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...

AirValid · 1 year ago

Hi Jared,

I have checked as you proposed serachmela.com . In deed it needs fewer clicks for a result. But then again, coming back to Sam's first coment Mobissiomo offers this type of fonction since over a year now plus many other fonctionlities.


How come Mobissimo is not since in this review or has not beened mentionned since?


A. BILQUEZ - Skype : abilquez
www.air-valid.com - France
Airline infos, rating, opinions to compare and booking.

Trevor Fernandes · 1 year ago

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

Priya Sharma · 1 year ago

Thanx for the nice information...There is one more source http://www.krris.travel to get online air ticket booking.

Venkat · 1 year ago

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