I guess they don't want to give users an autocomplete based form. In my view auto completes are a little confusing on a slow network and is worse user experience than simple select boxes.
Moreover bulk of their revenues come from domestic and therefore they do not want to confuse the user with all the international airport names. It is not as if you give them a single form and instead of booking a flight to Delhi they will end up booking one for Paris!

I thought it has got to do with differential pricing for airlines and big hotels??

that's a cheap shot at your competition. i respected cleartrip for all the good work you do, but taking such cracks at your competition only shows your insecurity.

I agree with P (comment #1). Autocomplete text boxes work horribly with slow dial-up connections. Ever tried the trains search over a Reliance datacard?

arrgh--we didn't intend it as a cheap shot, we're just wondering why the practice is so prevalent. One of the many reasons we publish the kinds of things we do on this blog is in the hope of raising the bar for all users, not just Cleartrip's users.

come on! That was definitely a cheapshot!

Was it? As we can see from the comments above, we've learned something about it already.

Once again, we didn't intend it as a cheap shot, but you're entitled to your opinion.

yup. no real reason to do it, and yup that was a cheapshot. you could've worded it differently.

Don't understand the fuss about the comments. I'm sure no one wants to malign anyone (competitor or otherwise), and the post was created solely as an open question for academic purposes......

My assumption for the different searches would be for differentiating the pre-populated location menus. Since one needs to drill down to the State & City, having one form for Domestic & Intl locations would be really long.

How else do you plan to do it? You would need to segregate domestic destinations from international and to do this; you would need an input before dropdown values are populated. This can be done by,

A. Having radio buttons - Domestic & International
B. Having a dropdown to select domestic / international
Or similar such user selection.
But any of these too require one additional click, don't they?

If you decide to ignore the slowness of auto complete feature, you can integrate these two options using auto complete like on www.sidestep.com.

Though the two options can be integrated, in my opinion, it is advisable to keep them separate for

A. The new tab 'International' boldly communicates the feature availability. Even if a user visits cleartrip for domestic bookings, the new tab ' International' would remind her of cleartrip when she needs to book an international flight.

B. I think the birth of clean UIs has a reason - Users know what they are here for. Keeping the same principle in mind, a user when visits cleartrip knows if she is looking at domestic or international flights and allowing her to be in a segregated area makes it much more comfortable.

C. A user like me develops a confidence that all the nuances of international travel would have been taken care of in this separate International section (though the form used at back end is same)

I agree.. its an indirect way of putting things across...I think utility of having diff searches is more weighty than a combined one.. calls for a confession!

@Anand: Optimum solution Anand :)