A month ago, we launched Expressway, one-click flight bookings — customers can book with just one click by saving their credit and debit cards securely in their Cleartrip Account. Since launch, we have seen traction among customers. Customers who’ve used Expressway for booking have often raved about the convenience and simplicity Expressway brings to the online booking experience. Measured by the daily number of bookings being made with Expressway, usage has exceeded our internal expectations by 5x.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Expressway is also available for hotels and international flights. To get started, just sign in to your Cleartrip Account and setup Expressway with your preferred card details and traveler name.

The next time you are booking an international flight or a hotel anywhere in the world, you will see a new tab Pay with a stored card in the payment options. Select the stored card you want to use, enter your CVV and then authenticate with your VerifiedByVisa (VBV) or 3D-Secure password to complete the booking instantly. It’s as simple and quick as that.

Get on Expressway today to see how the best online booking experience has been made even better. For a limited time, you can save a thousand bucks when you book with Expressway.

Last year, we introduced payments with equal monthly instalments as a part of our commitment to giving our users the most choices about how to pay. Today, we’re adding one more choice to our payment options – you can now pay with cash, the simplest payment option of all. You are no longer restricted to cards and online bank accounts to make payments. All you need is cash in hand and a destination in mind.

Cash payments are accepted for flights and hotels, domestic or international.

To Pay with Cash, just click the “Pay with Cash” tab on the payment page to select from two different cash payment methods: “Cash on Delivery” and “Bank Deposit”.

Cash on Delivery

For “Cash on delivery”, or COD, you need to give us a pickup address, phone number and a few other details. You will receive a temporary trip ID and someone will be at your pickup address within 24 hours to collect the cash and give you a receipt for the same. Within 30 minutes of the cash being collected, your tickets will be emailed to you.

Deposit cash in a Bank

To pay with a “Bank Deposit”, you will also receive a temporary trip ID along with a set of instructions on the booking confirmation page. Just follow the instructions and deposit the cash in Cleartrip’s account by visiting your nearest ICICI Bank branch. Within the next 2 hours of depositing the cash, your tickets will be in your email’s inbox.

It’s that simple. And it’s FREE - we don’t charge you a penny extra for paying with cash. Because all your money is good here: plastic, electronic and plain old cash.

Note: You need to quote your PAN card number incase your booking amount exceeds Rs 25,000.

Over the last five-plus years, Cleartrip has had the privilege of being used to book hundreds of thousands of trips of all kinds — flights, hotels and trains. Along with that privilege, we get the benefit of vast insights into the booking patterns and behaviour of our customers. We’re always asking questions about our customers — what do they book? how do they like to pay for it? how often do they book? who do they book for?

While looking at the data to answer that last question, we saw that a large number of our customers book repeatedly for people other than themselves. They book travel for family-members, friends and colleagues with astonishing regularity and for a range of different reasons — low internet and PC penetration and a lack of tech-savviness. Another key reason people book for others is that, despite the rapid growth of India’s online economy over the last few years, not everyone possesses the ability or the comfort to make payments online:

For Indians, the idea of credit isn’t second nature (yet) and the adoption of electronic payments has been slow. India remains a cash-driven economy with over 95% of retail transactions still carried out through cash. The “carded” population is significantly lower than the global benchmarks, creating challenges for e-commerce players.
~ The Nilson Report

Given that a large number of customers were booking travel for others, we wanted to make booking trips for others as simple and convenient as booking your own trips. With the all-new Cleartrip Account, we’ve dramatically simplified things — booking travel for other people no longer plays second fiddle to booking travel for yourself. Customers have been able to store detailed traveller profile data in their own user profile for a while now; details such as phone numbers, email addresses, date of birth, passport details and more could be stored and then used automatically the next time you booked. Storing these details meant you no longer had to type them in repeatedly every time you booked. In the new Cleartrip account, you can create as many different traveller profiles as you like and you can populate these profiles with as much or as little detail as you want.

When you create traveller profiles for the people you book often for, you won’t need to type in any of their details while making your next booking for them. For instance, making an international flight booking requires profile details in addition to the traveller’s name — a date of birth and passport details are also required. Filling out detailed traveller profiles for all the people you book for makes booking trips dramatically simpler, easier and faster by eliminating the tedium and errors that come with repetitive typing. All the relevant data from a traveller profile will be filled in automagically when you book.

We’ve also simplified the act of creating traveller profiles — if you make a booking for a completely new traveller, that person will be listed under the “Recently booked for” tab on the Travellers screen. You can quickly and easily transfer people into your travellers list from here or you can delete them if you don’t think you’ll ever be booking for them again.

We hope you like the new Travellers feature in your Cleartrip Account. We wanted to make booking travel for your friends and family a zero-hassle experience, we think you’re going to love it.

Last week, when we announced the all-new better, slicker and faster Cleartrip Account, we briefly touched upon the integration with Facebook Connect:

We’ve always believed that travel is an inherently social activity – people travel to push their personal boundaries outwards through exploration.

We think travel gets so much better when you can experience and share it with your family and friends. Today, we’re going to walk through the most important pieces of the new Facebook Connect integration.

To connect your Cleartrip and Facebook accounts, all you have to do is sign in to your Cleartrip Account. You’ll see a large ‘Connect with Facebook’ button on the dashboard and profile screens.

Clicking that button will pop open a new window where you need to sign in to your Facebook account and authorise the connection with your Cleartrip Account. Once you authorise the connection, you can choose what information you want to import from your Facebook account — options include your full name, your current Facebook picture, your date of birth and your current home city. We only ask for the information we need in to make your travel search and booking experience faster and easier. Things like your full name and date of birth help because we can send that information automatically to airlines or hotels when you book. Similarly, setting your current home city as your home airport helps us personalise the deals and offers we send you, ensuring that you only see the ones that are relevant to you.

And last but not least, the most exciting feature afforded by our integration with Facebook Connect is AutoShare. When you turn AutoShare on, your travel plans are automatically shared with your network on Facebook. We love AutoShare because it lets everyone tap into the vast repository of travel experience that resides in your network. When you AutoShare your travel plans, your entire network can help you with travel tips and recommendations for your destination. AutoShare has the added advantage of letting people in your network tell you if they’re going to be in the same place as you when you’re travelling — whether they’re also travelling there or whether they’re residents of your destination. AutoShare is an opt-in feature which you can turn on and off as you please, you’re completely in control. And AutoShare is designed to protect your travel information; you can rest easy knowing that only the very general aspects of your travel will be shared — your destination, your date of arrival and nothing else.

You can turn off AutoShare at any time from within the settings section of your Cleartrip Account.

Connect your Cleartrip and Facebook accounts today to make the most of your travel — there’s a world of experienced travellers in your social network and they all want to help you have a great trip.

At Cleartrip, we’ve always been passionate about delivering the very best user experiences we can. Observation is one of the key tools we use to refine our products. We’re huge believers in the power of observation – nothing delivers insight into user-behaviour and usability like it. We regularly take what we observe and use it to make our products better.

A recent analysis of user-search behaviour on our site showed that nearly two-thirds of our users perform the exact same searches multiple times before they actually make a booking. On average, users perform the same search five times, and over three days, before finally making a booking. Looking at the data, it was blindingly obvious that we needed to make this ‘re-search’ process dramatically easy for our users.

It was also obvious that delivering an elegant solution to our users would involve changing our home page. At Cleartrip, we’ve had to work incredibly hard to maintain the simplicity of our home page – it may look simple from the outside, but it takes a monumental amount of work and commitment to keep it simple; so, we have an inbuilt allergy to changing our homepage. The only way to really get a change to our home page approved is by proposing a change which makes the home page unequivocally, indisputably better.

There, in a nut, lay our design challenge – the most elegant solution required changing the home page, but the home page is massively resistant to change.

Adding clutter to the home page is a surefire way to stir up our anti-change allergens, so any design would have to add something completely new to the home page without adding any clutter.

To work within that constraint, we applied the Accordion design pattern to ‘make room’ without adding clutter – a single accordion unit with two separate panels; one for our promotional links and one for quick access to your recent searches. Only one panel is visible at a time and users can switch between panels with ease.

The recent searches panel in the accordion displays three rows of information for your last three searches. Each row shows the parameters for your last search – cities and dates. We didn’t think that just showing you your last search was enough, so we added the cheapest current price for your search and how the fare has changed since the time you did your last search. Finally, we made each row clickable so that you can ‘re-search’ your travel with just one click.

We liked this design so much that we’re introducing the travel ‘re-search’ feature for our flight, hotel and train searches simultaneously.

We hope we’ve made your travel ‘re-search’ simpler – one less thing to remember and one less search form between you and your travel.

Starting today, you can book cabs to the airport along with your Cleartrip flight bookings because making arrangements to get to the airport shouldn’t have to be a separate task for our customers. Booking a cab to the airport at the same time as you book your flights is a huge convenience – you don’t have to remember to call the cab company on the day before your flight, you get to book your cab in advance and you don’t have to spend any time at all on the phone with them.

India’s two most popular radio cab companies, Meru and EasyCab, are both available for booking directly through Cleartrip. Currently the only site offering this convenience and choice at no extra charge, we’ve kept it as simple as we could. Once you complete your flight booking, you’ll see a new tab on our confirmation page asking if you’d like to book a cab to the airport.

If you wish to book the airport ride closer to your departure date, you can even do so from your trips page, just by signing into your brand spanking new Cleartrip account.

To book your cab, you just need to give us a few details such as your pick-up time, address and contact details.

Once you’ve booked your cab, you will receive a confirmation SMS either instantly or 30-minutes prior to departure (depending on the cab service you select). You pay the cab directly when they drop you off at the airport – Cleartrip does not charge you anything at all when you book a cab through us. At this time, cab bookings are available only in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

So, sit back and enjoy your ride to the airport.