Dynamic fares=Cheaper flights + More options Hrush Mar 17, 2009

11 comments

We’re always on the lookout for ways to make travel more affordable to our customers. Yesterday, we launched Dynamic fares, a significant improvement to the manner in which our flight search works–Cleartrip’s flight search now dynamically constructs fares and itineraries based on a set of rules that are applied to your origin and destination.

This new search feature comes in especially handy if you are flying between cities with very few or no direct flights available to your destination e.g. Mumbai-Port Blair, New Delhi-Madurai, Bangalore-Ranchi etc. The feature is particularly helpful for travellers from smaller cities such as Chandigarh, Imphal, Patna, Lucknow and many others that have fewer flights and limited connections available to airports in India.

In cases where only one or very few flights are available, a single airline usually operates the route with a stop along the way. Because of the scarcity of options available, the airline is free to charge very high prices for customers who want to fly that route.

Cleartrip’s enhanced flight search gives customers more options and cheaper prices by dynamically combining flights from multiple airlines to create the best price. Under the hood, Cleartrip has sophisticated route and fare construction algorithms running to make sure that customers can find cheaper fares, no matter where they’re flying.

Before we launched, we ran extensive benchmarks of our enhanced search to get an idea of the savings we could deliver for customers; and the results were astounding even to us. Our dynamically constructed fares saved an average of 24% and, in some cases, lowered prices by a whopping 40%. We’ve made some of our benchmarking data available in below:

Note:: ‘NA’ above indicates that no flights were found for a search.

As the data shows, Cleartrip’s dynamic fares consistently deliver the best pricing, beating our old flight search every single time. Keep in mind that Cleartrip’s dynamically generated prices are not available anywhere but on Cleartrip’s own site–since the routes and fares are constructed by algorithms on the fly, the fares are only available at Cleartrip.