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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 :P
  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.

Posted on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 12:58PM by Registered CommenterHrush | Comments52 Comments

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Reader Comments (52)

I am strongly against promoting a airline like DECCAN. This is big joke with passengers as you never know when they cancle.

I will request and guide people NOT TO use airdeccan -it is better to spend some extra but go on any other airlines.

HAD VERY baD EXPERIENCE WITH THEM
December 16, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterDuggal J
Duggal J - Air Deccan is a large airline in India and it's available as a part of our search. To be effective, our search has to be comprehensive.

As a passenger, we leave it to you to choose which airline you'd like to fly.
December 16, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterHrush
I had a worst experience with cleartrip itself.i tried for a whole day,for a call on the only one cust. service no. and wasted a lot of money for holding on call and finally cut after a long wait.
Cust. support are not keen to reply to cust's mails.They looks towards mail as a joke or what? .Recently i sent one more mail reg. cancellation of ticket,yet after 4-5 days ,i didnt receive the refund nor the info. about the same...

So,its beeter to spend more money somewhere,but not to go for the travel agents like this......
Only advertising doesnt help to grow the business,they should give the quality service too.
December 17, 2006 | Unregistered Commentervishal
Hi, why don't you link ticket bookings to frequent flyer miles? One of the other travel sites has this option and I think it's great for the customer. I booked a couple of Jet tickets for my parents through your site but couldn't get the frequent flyer points because the tickets were not in my name. Any plans to do something about it?
December 19, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterMohan
I would like to share a bitter experince of dealing by the Customer Care Officer with the would be customers of cleartrip.com.Due to paucity of time, I would like to paste the letter which I had written to them for the problem I faced. I think it would be self explanatory.
Dear Customer Care Officer,

[Subject: Cancellation of Air Ticket booking from Delhi to Mumbai
Ref: PNR No. HGPDG

I booked two tickets thru your website on 19.12.05 for Delhi to Mumbai in Sahara Flights S2 101 & S2 203 for Delhi to Mumbai (Round Trip) on 25/12/06 & 31/12/06 in the name of MRS. SOMA NATH and MASTER AKASHDEEP NATH and made the payments of Rs.11.843/- thru city bank credit card. The amount has already been billed and debited to my credit card. Since, you did not confirm booking in spite of several requests, I had to buy the tickets directly from the Sahara Airlines. I had sent you number of mails for canceling the said booking and re-crediting the same to my credit card. It is a matter of great regret that in spite of number of mails requesting for cancellation of the booking, you had not cared to respond it. I contacted your customer officer over telephone on 20.12.06 thru my friend in Mumbai and requested for cancellation of the booking and issuance of necessary instruction to the credit card division concerned for re-crediting the same to my credit card. While the concerned customer care officer had informed that no booking was confirmed, I came to know from the Sahara Airlines that the bookings were confirmed and PNR No.HGPDG was also generated.

I would like to mention that in my cleartrip.com account (nbiplab@yahoo.com), no booking is being reflected under < trips>. Therefore, I cannot even cancel it thru online.

You are once again requested to cancel the above referred bookings immediately and refund the amount of Rs.11,843/- under intimation to me in return mail or SMS in my mobile number. ( 011- 9891291550) immediately.


Biplab Nath
December 21, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterbIPLAB nATH
Hi Biplabh,

You are also entangled in the web of Cleartrip just like us who are at their mercy and cannot do anything.
December 21, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterSiddharth Sinha
Biplab, Siddharth, Vishal -- you have my deepest apologies for the delays in your cases. I am personally looking into them and hope to have some answers for each of you within a few hours.

Once again, I'm sorry for the delays, rest assured that we're working hard to clear each of your cases.
December 21, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterHrush
You people are a set of the most imcompetent buffoons I have ever come across in my life. I have been trying to get through to your call centre number. Not getting through is one thing but hanging up on me is just not acceptable. I am going around telling everyone I can to not use your system from the year 1801.

Seriously. How do you expect you guys to come back to you after this?
December 23, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterVarun Cheemra
Varun - I'm terribly sorry to hear about your experience.

We're hiring customer care executives as fast as we can to ensure that these things do not happen.

If you need assistance, please let me know what you need and I will look into it immediately.

Once again, my sincerest apologies. We've been swamped by massive growth, but that's no excuse and if you let me know what you need, we will do our best to help you.
December 23, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterHrush
Very good and clear interface. Ease of use 10/10 Marks.
~Puneet
December 28, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterPuneet
No drama, No Ads Clean interface. Cleartrip is doing a better job as compared to other travel portals in india. If only they also had rediff fare cast kind of product integrated it would do wonders. Telling me when to fly between dates will surely increase chances for making a reservation for cleartrip portal.
December 28, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterSiddharth Puri
in air deccan booking through your site the facility of booking for an infant is not available and i would request you to please include the same after tie up with the air deccan other wise how will i travel in airdeccan with my one year old son.
December 28, 2006 | Unregistered Commenterchetan
please include in the airdeccan booking for booking of an infant and for ochild below one year old. how could i travel with my one year old child.
December 28, 2006 | Unregistered Commenterchetan
Hey, novel effort. Appreciate your willingness to publish some of the above not-so nice comments about cleartrip. Wish you guys luck.
January 5, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterDJ
Cleartrip works perfectly for me, and I wanted to post this comment to acknowledge the effort that has been put by the guys behind cleartrip. There are always problems at the start of a new idea/project, and that for me is understandable.

Keep up the good work. Cheers!
January 8, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterMayank
Hi,

U website is clean and neat ans of now i had a very good experince with you guys , only feedback is have a toolfree number to get in touch with u from any part of india.

Nice website but the hotel section is bad it does not offer budget hotles, probably u guys need to look into this
January 10, 2007 | Unregistered Commentervinay
Hi,

This is to inform you that i went your site with great expectation of getting the cheapest offer for Bombay-Bangalore-Bombay. When i compared your prices with different airlines directly on their website, i was totally surprised to see that their fares were lower than those mentioned on your site. Isnt this defeating the whole purpose of your existence.

Moreover, there is no mention of fares for senior citizens.

Also, it is not necessary that everybody moves around with creditcard. It would be better if you could accept debit cards of major banks.

Your motto of booking in three simple steps doesnt hold good at all. Dont promise things that you cant deliver.

Awaiting your immediate reply.

Hope you take ncecessary action to clean/CLEAR up your act.

Thanks
Nikhil
January 11, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterNikhil Kulkarni
Nikhil -- thanks for your feedback.

Cleartrip has never claimed to be the "cheapest" travel site.

We simply don't believe that we can provide our customers with a reliable guarantee that we will always be the "cheapest."

We do, however, guarantee that Cleartrip is the *simplest* way to search and book your travel.
January 12, 2007 | Registered CommenterHrush
Your site is great. The UI is clean and intuitive and the site is fast. This is one of the best sites I've used for booking flights for India.
January 13, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterNandini
I am also having a terrible time with this new online travel company called Cleartrip. I would say that they are not clear on how to run a business. Their system is wrecked or broke and their phone respresentatives are liars. My confirmation # was 06364AD537 which required an e-ticket. By this company promptly sent me a paper ticket. I was then asked to return the ticket after they agreed that they would issue an e-ticket but I have not seen any response from the company.

I have made multiple long distance calls and sent innumerable emails to no effect. Every time the phone reps say that they will 'get back'! I guess my phone bills, courier cost and mental hassle far exceeds the saving I was hoping to make by booking at this site rather than my regular trip site.
January 16, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterSaswata

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