See refundable fares in search results Hrush May 14, 2009

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We recently modified our flight search results to make it easier for you to find fully refundable fares for when you need flexibility in your schedule. We have tons of customers that fly for business; and business travellers have schedules that are subject to change.

When flight timings or dates are likely to change, it’s much more affordable to purchase a refundable fare. Fully refundable fares are often available for only an additional Rs.100-200, and if your schedule changes that small extra turns out to be a lot cheaper than cancelling or amending a non-refundable ticket.

To make it easier to select refundable fares, we’ve added a “Show refundable fares only” checkbox to our search filters; directly below the price slider:

In addition to the checkbox, we’ve also added labels within the search results that show whether a fare is refundable or not.

While implementing this, we looked at how other sites do it and found that it fell short of our expectations–most sites will simply remove all the non-refundable fares and flights from the search results. We don’t like that approach because it decreases the choices available to customers by half. So, we went the extra mile to implement this feature differently.

Due to the legacy pricing complications in the airline industry, there are usually multiple fares available for the exact same flight–some of these fares are refundable and some of them are not.

So, instead of removing flights completely when you apply the refundable fares filter, we ‘exchange’ or ‘swap’ the non-refundable fares with refundable fares for all flights where such a fare is available. The default view for search results displays the cheapest possible fare; if you apply the refundable fares filter, we display the cheapest refundable fare.

Doing it this way maintains the broadest selection of available flights for our customers, regardless of which type of fare they want to purchase–unlike other sites that simply halve the amount of flights and butcher the search results.

We’re quite happy with the way we’ve delivered this new search feature. Give it a try today and compare with other sites to see what a huge difference it makes. As we mentioned in Spit and polish, we’re focusing our energies on making a lot of the ‘little things’ better in our existing products; this is just one of those changes and we hope you like it.