I introduced my parents to all these Indian travel sites (including Cleartrip) and more than usability, their biggest complaint has always been how annoying the entire experience of calling someone up in order to cancel their tickets or change travel dates is. They tell me that they had a better experience with Cleartrip but with a few others, they had to go through hell to get their refund. So I recommend working on the entire call center experience rather than making your AJAX UI more slick :-) Either that or you should seriously consider automating these other activities (why can't you just allow a user to login to the site and cancel the tickets and just get a refund immediately without any fuss?).

Unfortunately as a result of this, my dad is back to using the local travel agent (not that they offer any better customer service but at least there's this option of dropping by their office and demanding your refund!).

Anybody who bothers to follow the link to their measurement model will find exactly what I did - nothing! It's a page full of marketing gook that provides no information at all about the methodology and criteria adopted for the study.

What makes this company think that I would be interested in buying a report and spend INR 480,000 every year with them without knowing even the basics - who all did the study cover, how large is the representative sample, what is the criteria for measurement, etc.

One look around the JuxtConsult website tells you what they really know about usability - not much.
- none of their links are distinguished from text content
- their right column is common across the site so it's not context-sensitive
- they use images instead of text for no apparent reason (funnily enough the one text item you would want to mask behind an image - an email address to prevent spam - is not masked)
- text on the diagram used is really too small to be any use at all
- they use light grey text for body content that will print terribly on a monochrome printer (most corporates - their target audience - use monochrome lasers for everyday printing)
- they don't offer a separate style-sheet for print
- the column widths change from page to page
- the border style on the right column changes from page to page
- their navigation is such that if you didn't click on one of the reports on the home page, you're not likely to find it from the navigation available on any of the other pages of the site. Goto their Products and Services page, and suddenly you can't find any of their three main featured reports - India Online 2008, NRI Online 2008 and the Website User Friendliness Study.

JuxtConsult - take a look at yourself before pointing fingers around the Internet. Seriously, what gives you the right to preach usability?

Harish--we take cancellations and refunds extremely seriously at Cleartrip. And we do that because we've heard so many of our users complain about it.

You can cancel your booking online:
http://www.cleartrip.com/forums/40/topics/55

Unfortunately, immediate refunds are simply not possible at the moment. We'd love to be able to do immediate refunds, maybe someday...