« Spit and polish | Main | Launch: iGoogle widget for Cleartrip Calendar »

Dynamic fares=Cheaper flights + More options

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:

FromToOld searchNew searchCompetitor
MumbaiPort Blair13,3289,58012,278
BangaloreRanchi10,1467,4449,108
KolkataKochi9,2326,9299,237
HyderabadImphal8,3808,1178,240
NagpurUdaipurNA*6,2528,193
MumbaiAgatti12,31910,51512,379
PuneAgatti11,25910,75611,522

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.

Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 01:59PM by Registered CommenterHrush | Comments10 Comments

PrintView Printer Friendly Version

EmailEmail Article to Friend

Reader Comments (10)

Hrush and team,

This is by far the best enhancement to Cleartrip. It saves the customers from hassles of repeated searches and with different combinations. Great piece of work.
Cheers!!!
March 18, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterRahul
Hrush, kudos on yet again leading the way.

Now lets push the envelope further and do this on trains :-). Not by price but by availability.

As an aside, can you guys plug in a "next confirmed seat available on " date on train searches, esp. when the next few days are all showing as booked. This should ideally work across classes to be most effective. It would definitely avoid multiple searches.
March 18, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterDhruv Chopra
You used some very heavy words like "sophisticated route and fare construction algorithms" for something semi-trivial like this. Apparently there is some serious "Computer Science Research" going on inside Cleartrip :p Makes sense when your competitors are doing nothing...

Anyway, a nice addition which was long overdue.
March 19, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterAnonymous Coward
Good for you- glad to see the continuous innovation.
March 20, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterMarie Hunter
the customer care tele no is useless. no one picks it up.
ur destination coloumn does not recognise vadodara and chandigarh airports.
why?
March 23, 2009 | Unregistered Commenterrajdeep
@rajdeep

Did you even try Vadodara and Chandigarh in the destination columns.Never accuse someone without facts man.Infact the columns can even identify mis-spelled destinations to some extent.
March 23, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterRahul
some flights are missing between bom to IXR
April 6, 2009 | Unregistered Commenternilesh kumar
OUT OF VARIOUS SITE , YU ALONE HAVE BEEN GIVING TOTAL FARE IN ONE GO ., ITS NOW GOOD TO SEE NEW OPTIONS. KEEP IT UP
April 6, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterRAJU
Your sophisticated algorithm says that there are no flight combinations from Kolkata (CCU) to Trichy (TRZ) say on 4 May with flexible dates, though there are in fact 'n' number of combinations available!
April 7, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterA.K.Ganguli
I don't think this is working correctly.. If I search for the flights between Hyd-> VNS,,I am getting just one flight route. HYD → DEL → VNS Kingfisher..

However, yatra.com give us atleast 2 airlines.. and makemytrip.com gives more than 2.. You need to improve your search further..
April 7, 2009 | Unregistered Commenternitesh

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.