The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It’s been a little over five months since we launched the Cleartrip site as a public beta on July 4, 2006. We’ve received a lot of customer feedback since and we love hearing from you.

We listen, keep our heads down and work hard to continually improve the site.

We’re launching this blog today to open an honest and transparent dialogue with our customers. In the spirit of honesty and transparency, we’re going to share some of the feedback we’ve received over the last five months.

We’ve segregated the feedback into three categories: Good, Bad and Ugly. Since customer complaints matter more to us than praise, we’re publishing two times as much negative feedback — 5 entries each in Ugly and Bad and 5 entries in Good.

All feedback has been published without any editing or censoring (profanity has been disguised). Any personally identifiable information has been removed for obvious reasons.

The Good

1. Don’t really know about improvement, but just wanted to write in to say that i think your website kick-ass! It’s the google of buying tickets online. Simple, clean, to the point! No riff-raff! Love the small world section. I can find all the information i want without having to look for it. Not to mention, the small text link promoting offers on the front page is probably more effective than web banners on a competitors website! I have booked on cleartrip and makemytrip, and you guys are definitely better. Love the fact you include taxes in your flight prices etc. Great going guys, Two thumbs up, pat on the back, and all that jazz! Cheers!
2. By havin a more consistent up time would be good. I understand that over a period of time all you hardware setup will be in place and this is bound to happen. The sooner the better for the whole travelling community. My friend and I were so pissed of with the existing similar services and at one point in time we wanted to write a similar one. Good we got one in time. Really wonderful job guys. What I particualarly liked: 1. When we choose the radio buttons, the cost is calculated without sending a request back to the server. This is good. I hated your competitors for this for this feature. 2. Javascript is very cleaverly used. Good job web dev folks. 3. I also like it simple and non-cluttery without all those offer distracting you. 4. I know the prices are a little high when compared to your competitors. Its always been just a couple of hundreds max, atleast for the places I was looking at. I know these issues will be present in the initial days. The sooner you compete, the better, obviously. Overall, this is job really well done. Keep up the good job. Kudos to the team. Things which can be improved: A lot of real estate in the opening page not well used I guess. I don’t know if you have it there to lure the advertizers of any banners. but you could make some innovative use of it. I shall send in feedbacks when I have one.
3. not needed… just send me goood offfers.. n i m happy ) .. n u know what.. we done the site for yatra.. n frankly speakin they screwed up wid the simple n sweet design to a desi 90′s design.. well i love cleartrip.. it rocks!!.. n simply best keep it up
4. Absolute perfect site for booking, I have been using other sites for on-line e-tickets, but nothing to match cleartrip site. A perfect 10 on 10 to you guys.
5. I think this is a great site to book your tickets. I have used makemytrip.com & yatra.com for booking tickets. But i find cleartrip.com the best, most user friendly & very simple to use. In just 3 steps one can book the flight. The best feature i liked about this site is the consolidated display of prices, the ability to select different flights & see the fare change immediately. The processing time is the fastest. I can book flights within minutes! Based on this experience i have immediately registered myself as a user! For a young site, i think the quality of work done is SIMPLY SUPERB. I wish i had started using this site much earlier. Anyway now i am one of your customers…for sure. And i’ll share my experience with my friends & colleagues. Good Luck!

The Bad

1. ‘Cleartrip’s system is behaving badly. Just like people, our system sometimes has a bad day and gets grumpy. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, please bear with us while we get it to behave.’ This is a regular occurance in cleartrip.com Since I first used this website, i have encountered this error(continuous in repeated searches) 60-70% of the time. Ofcourse, it might be because of the time i access the website, but there might be lot of people like me. And many of them never bother to write a feedback. BTW, your website interface is of very good design than the competitors. But till you reduce your downtime your competitors will always have an upper hand.
2. the first page is very utilitarian. make it hit the customer in the face, though not so hard that the nose comes out the backside. I mean a little UI change at the 1st page, to attract teh customer, while not losing out on the speed element. I like the visual arrangement and the sparing use of Ajax. I am sure there is a lot more to be done on teh site, plus linking with other data sources, and providers. Good luck
3. Man, ur site is too slow. i went off to sleep this way, i will miss the flight hahahhahah better speed up man. otherwise, u can see all snoring
4. The site is not listing all the options/airlines like Indigo, Go Air, Kingfisher Airlines, Air Deccan etc., Not interested in flying JET Airways alone..It is not VFM
5. Looks like a site designed by a child of 4years and your adverts in the paper are misleading….not very good..

The Ugly

1. need more pictures, not a very good hotel selection. I work for Orbitz and they told me to test out your website so we can get into India, now we realized that there isn’t much competition for India. We will dominate…Cleartrip shouldn’t even bother working on this…there is no point. Sorry to deliver the bad news.
2. This is a peice of crap with an internal server error
3. Its a crap arrangement, far disgusting than MakeMyTrip.com or TravelGuru.com. You have negligible options. Do some more surveys and get hold of more hotels and airlines.
4. Yours is the most useless travel site I found.Your system could not find a single flight for any of the destinations I gave, including Bombay Delhi. You should be charged with misleading peopole thru full page advts. I am sure even this remark of mine may not get registered.What a waste of time
5. try to imprope ur website its totally jamed i used it for the first time tried 5 times but did got the flights. in short ur site is totally messed up…. sorry to say tht but its a very genuin and positive feedback…..

We care deeply about your experiences with us and in an upcoming post, we will talk about how customer feedback is integral to the ongoing development of our site.