“From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: it’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character.”
~ Steve Jobs
The statement is widely applicable beyond just ‘software as code’; it holds good for software as movies, television shows, music and books. When talented people can’t make money by creating software because of piracy and theft, there will just be fewer talented people creating software. When all that’s left is dog and cat videos, inane blogs and talentless creators, then we will have paid the full price of piracy.
At Cleartrip, we’re always looking for new ways to make life easier for our customers. One of the biggest pain-points for online travel bookers in general is rescheduling flights when their travel plans change. The only way to do this right now is to call customer support. In fact, almost a third of the inbound calls to our customer support team are flight change requests, and these calls last a good 15 to 20 minutes on average, sometimes even more.
As you can imagine, such a call is hardly an enjoyable experience, no matter how good the customer care executive is. It usually entails the caller explaining the issue to the executive, who then lists out alternate flights to choose from, their timings and the associated difference in fares. If the user prefers to pay using a credit card via IVR, then the process becomes even more harrowing as the caller may need to disconnect the call to receive the one-time password (OTP) and subsequently call back to confirm the payment. In a nut, while booking a flight is a seamless process, rescheduling one is quite the opposite.
Today we make this old school approach of changing flights obsolete. Starting today, we’re giving our customers the freedom and flexibility to change flights online. We’re proud to say that we are the first online travel agent (OTA) in India, and probably the first in the world, to offer this feature.
Be it any form of itinerary modification – date change, flight change, time change, changes for select passengers, changes for select sectors, changes for select passengers on select sectors – with Cleartrip, it’s all just a few clicks away. All you need to do is log in to your Cleartrip Account, click on the ‘Change flights’ icon, and change the booking online in a flash.
You’ll need to choose alternate travel dates for the onward journey and/or the return journey, and select the passengers for whom you want to change flights. For the remaining passengers and legs of the journey, the original booking would stay as is.
This leads to the search results display, where you’ll be presented with the complete set of domestic airlines and flights to choose from. The flights are sorted in increasing order of the difference you need to pay to make the changes, and you can choose any flight of any airline you want. And if the fare on your chosen flight is lower than what you paid earlier (plus the airline amendment fees), you’ll get a refund for the difference.
Upon selecting the desired flight, you can proceed to review the selection and make the payment as you would for a new flight booking.
The flight change confirmation and new e-tickets would be emailed to you and can also be accessed through your Cleartrip Account.
The whole process should not take more than a minute or two, and our customers have already fallen in love with it. We made this feature live yesterday, and we’ve already seen huge uptake on the very first day, even before the announcement. As many as half of the total flight changes yesterday were made online, instead of on the phone with customer care.
That’s not all – we’ve decided to waive off the Cleartrip amendment fees of Rs 300 for itinerary changes done online. Given that airline date-change & cancellation fees have been rising steadily in the last few months, this is our way of helping you save not only time, but also money.
We understand that changes in travel plans can be unnerving. With the ability to change flights online, you can focus on the upcoming journey instead of worrying about spending half an hour on the phone to change flights. So next time your travel plans change, go ahead and change your flights online – we guarantee you’ll wonder how you managed without it all these years!
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” – Ken Blanchard
Earlier this year, Cleartrip added support for Passbook and made paperless travel easier. Since then, we’ve received a lot of feedback on the design of the Passes. Now, we’re not the kind of guys who sit back and take feedback passively — we love getting feedback and we love getting better because of it.
Most of our customers have been telling us how it’s helped them have one less thing to worry about when they travel; and quite a few of them have suggested enhancements as well. The top demand was to put the PNR number on the front of the Pass. Another recurring piece of feedback was that some customers had trouble getting into the airport because the year of travel was not mentioned on the Pass.
It was also amazing to see many of our most frequent fliers go paperless and share screenshots of their iPhones stacked from top to bottom with Cleartrip Passes. When you’re trying to save the planet, every little bit counts…
With location and time-based notifications, Passes appear automatically on home-screens just when they’re needed, but we thought it was quite hard to tell one pass from the other in a tall stack of passes like above.
So, we put on our editor’s hats, waded in to change things for the better and here we are with a set of better designed Passes.
As expected, PNR is right upfront for flight, but due to limited space we could only do it for tickets with a single traveller. For multiple travellers, the PNR are still available only on the back of the pass. We’ve also added the year to the date of travel and terminal information, again at the back for the Pass.
For users like Sudhir, we’ve moved the date and destination to the top of the Pass to make it easy to find the right Pass with just a glimpse.
These changes also apply to our Train and Hotel Passes. In addition, Hotel Passes now sport an image of the hotel on them.
As we mentioned earlier, these Passes are designed for iPhone and iPod Touch devices running iOS6 or higher and any Mac running OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2 or later). Android users can also use them through third-party apps like PassWallet and other third-party apps with Passbook support available from the Google Play store.
So far, we’ve personally verified that Cleartrip Passes have been successfully used for paperless travel in Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, Goa, Pune, Jaipur, Thiruvananthapuram, Lucknow and Nagpur. If you’ve used it for any other airport, do let us know so that more people can confidently save the planet and #go_paperless.
You can put it down to the fabled itch — after seven long years, Cleartrip and White Space are getting a divorce. Cleartrip has always focused on simplicity in the design of our products and our home page has been no different; it’s simple, focused and devoid of clutter.
We thought these were good things, but market research showed otherwise. In recent interviews conducted by our market research teams, we heard the same things over and over again:
Clutter = Cheap. Seeing the lack of clutter on our home page leads to customers perceiving the Cleartrip brand as ‘premium’ or ‘expensive’ and that’s not good for us.
People like their preferred travel websites to look like Christmas trees on Christmas day, they want the flashing, blinking, dancing and twinkling. Without any of the bling, Cleartrip’s home page was coming off as the unadorned step-child that no one cared about enough to decorate.
In addition to the above two themes, our own marketing teams have long been clamouring for more real estate to be made available to them to showcase our many deals, offers, coupons and more.
The writing has been on the wall for a long time, we just needed the courage to read it and accept it. Today, we’re doing just that and surrendering to design’s new mantra — Form before function.
In just a few weeks, we will be launching an all new home page design with more bells, whistles and bling than you can shake a stick at. Here’s a sneak preview:
Much to the anguish of Cleartrip’s celebrated design and product teams, marketing has finally won the war. It no longer makes sense for us to go tilting at windmills. We’ve fought the good fight as long as we could, but now we need to surrender to conventional business wisdom and the realities of what customers prefer.
It’s a sad day. Goodbye white space, we’ll miss you.
Some months ago we launched the first version of our Android app and not a day went by that our Android users didn’t compare it with Cleartrip for iOS and express their discontent. Reviews of Cleartrip for Android app on the Google Play store consistently pointed out the difference; like this one:
If you have used Cleartrip app on iPhone, you would die after using this. ~ by Prabal Dave
We don’t like the idea of people dying while using our products. We’re just not that kind of company.
Cleartrip White has been rebuilt from scratch as Pure Android — the best of Android design and development guidelines combined with Cleartrip’s own spit and polish.
Smart Home page
You need your mobile app to tell you where you’re going next, and Smart Home displays your next trip upfront for access with just one tap.
Split Screen Search
The easiest and funnest way to book round trip flights comes to Android — and it’s all on one screen.
Magically fill out traveller info
Typing sucks, re-typing sucks more. We’ve brought deeper integration between your Cleartrip Account and Android with saved traveller profiles — all saved traveller names and profiles are available for one-tap selection.
go_paperless, even when offline
All your travel details stay with you, even when you have no access to the Internet.
Six years ago, we started Cleartrip with one mission: Making travel simple. Behind this lies a fervent belief that travel websites should aid the process of planning and booking your travel, not get in your way. And this belief is reflected in our own philosophy towards travel in general: we’re big believers in do-it-yourself holidays. Not for us the grind of canned holiday packages, with someone else telling you what to see and when. We believe a holiday should have your own personal imprint.
With that in mind, we’re excited to announce the launch of Cleartrip Packages today.
The idea is simple: you select the destination, we help you get there and choose a nice hotel, while saving you a ton of money. By bringing the best hotels and the most convenient flights together on one screen, Packages helps you get your travel bookings out of the way in one shot. The rest is a blank canvas for you to paint your holiday on.
We’ve negotiated the best rates with airlines and hotels to offer huge savings on destinations in India and abroad. What’s more, you can even book Packages for destinations without airports — so you can book a hotel in Manali and flights to Delhi, and still get great savings. The table below shows indicative Package prices for some popular destinations, for a two night package for two people.
From – To
Hotel category
Regular price
Package price
Savings
Mumbai – Goa
5 star
Rs. 35,013
Rs. 22,467
Rs. 12,546
Delhi – Mumbai
5 star
Rs. 49,365
Rs. 29,593
Rs. 19,772
Mumbai – Jaipur
5 star
Rs. 60,125
Rs. 36,213
Rs. 23,912
Mumbai – Bangalore
4 star
Rs. 40,117
Rs. 20,932
Rs. 19,185
Bangalore – Goa
5 star
Rs. 34,581
Rs. 23,855
Rs. 10,726
Bangalore – Delhi
5 star
Rs. 50,421
Rs. 29,887
Rs. 20,534
Mumbai – Manali
4 star
Rs. 36,327
Rs. 24,420
Rs. 11,907
Bangalore – Shirdi
4 star
Rs. 21,192
Rs. 13,940
Rs. 7,252
The result: you spend less on flights and hotels, and have more time and money to spend on the things you do at your destination, the things that really make your holiday memorable.
So go ahead, book the Package that’s perfect for you. We hope you have a fantastic holiday.
We recently released version 2 of Cleartrip for iPhone; and last week we followed up with a post on the design goodness that we poured into it. Today, we wanted to share the thinking behind the parts of the design which are specific to booking international flights on your iPhone.
The process of booking roundtrip flights has always posed interesting design challenges. To overcome the challenges, Cleartrip invented the split screen view for domestic flights when we launched.
Users can pick departure and return flights on the same screen and get the total price for the trip upfront. This gives our customers more control and simplifies their decision-making as they select which flights to book.
We later brought this split screen to Cleartrip for iPhone which was only supporting domestic flights at the time.
Since domestic airfares are mostly based on point-to-point pricing, consumers have the complete flexibility to combine different airlines and flights to get the best itinerary for their trip. The split screen design is the most elegant solution, giving customers complete control while instantly letting them know the total price for the flights they’ve selected.
Complexity on international flights
International airfares, however, are far more complex than domestic fares. Airlines price one-way tickets much higher than round trips to optimise their yields and load factors. In some cases, the price of a one way ticket is almost as high as that of a round trip ticket. The number of airlines and routes are far higher and there is almost always an infinite number of possible airline and flight combinations.
The split screen we designed for domestic flights, just wouldn’t work in this scenario.
How we handle this on the desktop site
On the desktop site, we were able to ease the decision making process in a limited way. In cases, where an airline is able to provide multiple itineraries at the exact same fare, we clubbed the results and displayed the best option upfront with a link to see all the other available options.
When expanded, you see all the available combinations at the same price.
Clubbing of itineraries reduced the complexity only to a certain extent. Deciding on the most suitable combination was still a pretty tedious task. A user has to scan all the combinations to pick the onward & return flight. This was a huge pain-point, and finding an elegant solution was key to easing the decision making process.
Split screen to the rescue
Since, most of the options are combinable, we decided to experiment with the split screen view as a secondary step. We prototyped this idea when we introduced international flights on the mobile site. We’ve been testing this approach on the mobile site to see the quality of results and found that 90% of the options that the airline provides at the same price are combinable with each other. It’s finally found it’s way to the iOS app without too many changes.
For us, this goes a long way towards the goal of creating the perfect international flight search experience. We hope it’s made your life easier, it certainly has for some of us who’ve had tough times sifting through the pre-packaged options provided by the airlines.
The most significant addition is that you can now search & book international flights with the app. But we’ve also made plenty of improvements to make booking on your phone a delightful experience. We’ve completely rebuilt the new version from the ground up so as to take full advantage of iPhone hardware and software, giving the app a major performance boost.
Flexible search form, aka ‘Touch-n-go’
With this update, we’ve also added the option to book Business, First and Premium-Economy Class tickets along with plain old Economy Class. Here’s the new touch-n-go:
The taller iPhone5 screen size pretty much made way for this – the class of travel simply fits right into the extra space available. For older screens, we’ve made sure the height is flexible so users don’t have to scroll to hit the search button.
Subtle differences
Although it may not be visible on the surface, we’ve worked hard to adapt the app to the new iOS6 design language. Our previous app had glassy headers and buttons, but for iOS6 we’ve moved over to softer shading.
We’ve also added texture to parts of the app, we think it gives the app more character and works well with the new iOS6 language. We’ve introduced the linen texture for all the drawers in the app.
Airline logos
Here’s a personal confession – our previous app had non-Retina airline logos. This time around, we weren’t going to overlook that detail.
We painstakingly optimised over 400 airline logos for the Retina display; a mammoth undertaking, but every time we look at the flight search results, we’re reminded that it was worth it.
Travellers
If you’re a frequent Cleartrip user and have saved travellers in your Cleartrip account, then you’re going to love this feature.
The beauty lies in how it is implemented – it takes just a single tap to automagically fill out information for saved travellers while booking.
Slide to pay
Once we were done with the core functionality, we couldn’t help but want to add something cool. We started off with many ideas, but ‘slide to pay’ made the cut. This will show up only for the users who have saved cards with us – a little extra love for our best customers.
Here’s how we started with slide to pay.
For a while we settled on the second iteration, with the ‘swiping a card’ metaphor. A lot of our internal users absolutely loved it – and we still get the question “why did you remove that!” But others didn’t quite catch hold of how it works, and we thought it introduced a bit too much friction.
The Expressway icon fits perfectly into the role of a slider; almost as if we’d had a glimpse of the future while designing the Expressway brand. Who knew paying money could be so much fun?
We hope you enjoy using this update as much as we enjoyed building it.
From the very beginning, Cleartrip has had a simple and unique philosophy towards the display of pricing in our products: “What you see is what you pay”. Cleartrip was the first travel company to display prices inclusive of taxes and fees; other websites continued displaying prices deceptively, without taxes and fees, until the DGCA mandated the display of the total price and its components in 2009.
Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud used in retail sales but also practiced in other contexts. First, customers are “baited” by merchants’ advertising products or services at a low price; then customers discover the advertised goods are not available. Other products are “switched” for them; however, these items are often costlier.
We’ve never wanted any part of this. Our approach to pricing has always been driven by a highly unfashionable business tool: common sense. Why would you show someone a price which is different from the price they pay? To test for mathematical skills? To make life harder for customers?
In the short run, however, our approach to pricing has an unfortunate side effect — we often hear the refrain from users that the prices they see on Cleartrip are higher than the competition.
Do you really pay more when you book with Cleartrip than on other travel websites? As with many things in life, the truth is not black and white. We recently came across this tweet from a customer:
How the transaction fee works is just one of the many ways other travel sites make themselves appear cheaper.
The simple truth is that on almost all other travel sites, the price you see and the price you pay will be two very different numbers. If you search for a Bangalore-Delhi return flight for 13-21 April 2013, here’s what you’ll see on Cleartrip and on other travel sites:
Cleartrip search results
Competition’s onward search results
Competition’s return search results
Looking at this, you’re likely to conclude that the competition is much cheaper than Cleartrip — because the onward flight is cheaper on the competitor’s website. But wait…
If you select the cheapest fares for the two flights and try to book those cheaper flights, the total amount should be Rs 4,582 + Rs 4,661 = Rs 9,243. But the amount you actually see on the booking summary is Rs 9,569:
While they show you a fare of Rs 4,582 for the onward flight (Air India flight AI-503), the fare that’s actually taken to calculate the total amount is Rs 4,908 — the fare that was struck out on the onward search results page. Interestingly, you’re not even shown the fares for the individual flights on the booking summary, so there’s no way for you to know this has happened (unless you’re checking the totals with a calculator).
This fare changes because some airlines offer discounted fares for round-trip bookings — you can book these fares only if you choose the same airline for both flights. However, when the competition showed you the fare for the onward flight, they had already applied the round-trip discount even though the discount was not valid. Of course, they also make no effort to highlight this fact once you’ve selected a return flight on a different airline.
Try to book the cheapest fares for both legs on Cleartrip, and the amount you see on the booking page is exactly the same as what you saw on the search results page. As a bonus, selecting the lowest fares on Cleartrip means overall you pay less than you would if you had done the same on a competing site (Rs 9,411 + transaction fee on Cleartrip vs Rs 9,569 + transaction fee on the competition):
Cleartrip booking page
It’s the same story with hotels — when you search a hotel room on Cleartrip for multiple nights, we don’t show you a per room per night rate without taxes. We show you the exact amount you will pay for all nights, including all taxes. No surprises.
Take a look at any of the travel sites dotting the globe and you’ll be hard-pressed to find transparent pricing — as we said, bait and switch is standard operating procedure in the travel industry. At Cleartrip, we don’t want any part of this; we’re happy to be the only fools proudly ignoring the proven strategy that works by misleading and tricking customers into booking.
Since our first app launch in the App Store, we’ve received tons of feedback from users around the world and we’re happy to say that the new app incorporates most of it. So, drumroll… and here are the headline items:
iPhone5 support
If you have an iPhone 5, the first thing you’ll notice is that Cleartrip for iPhone has grown taller and beautifully fills out the entire 4 inch screen. Wave goodbye to that ugly black patch, it’s gone for good.
International flights
Booking an international flight on the move isn’t a hassle anymore, as we bring our entire gamut of over 500 airlines in the palm of your hand. But it doesn’t end there, we’ve added support for local currencies and popular airports for each country, making it a truly international app.
We are introducing support for twelve popular countries that can be selected under Settings and the fares will automatically be shown in local currency. Our customers in the Middle East (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE) can now make payments in their local currency. Customers from other countries will see an INR conversion on the payment page.
Magically fill out traveller info
Fill out traveller details with just one tap while booking. We’re bringing even deeper integration between your Cleartrip Account and the app experience. If you’ve saved traveller profiles in your Cleartrip Account, all those profiles are now available when you book with the app.
Adding your trips to Passbook is now easier. In addition, complete trip details are always available on your phone even if you don’t have access to the Internet.
Seamless social integration
Now it’s easier than ever to spread the love for Cleartrip without leaving the app to do it. Sign in to Facebook or Twitter once and you’ll be off and sharing.
Fly Business Class
With this update, we’ve also added the option to book Business, First and Premium-Economy Class tickets along with plain old Economy Class.
Create an account
No need to use your laptop to create a Cleartrip Account any more, you can now create your account from inside the app and access all your booked trips, e-tickets, invoices, travel preferences in one place.
So update your app from the App Store now and experience the awesomeness.
If you’ve bought an iPhone recently and don’t have the app as yet, give it a spin and spread the love.
