In keeping with what we said in Spit and polish, we're thrilled to announce a redesigned Cleartrip Calendar today:

Click the image for a full sized preview.

We've cleaned up the look of the calendar, bringing it in line with the same visual style we developed for the new trip calendar in your Cleartrip account. We also moved the search form and airline filters to the left of the calendar instead of above.

We did add one big feature to this release--support for round trip searches on the calendar. This has been one of the top requests from customers ever since the launch of the Calendar and we've been meaning to oblige for a while.

For a round trip search, you'll need to fill out one more field before you search--the duration of your trip e.g. '6 days.' When you do a round trip search, you get to see the cheapest total fare for each day--convenient isn't it? The airline names for both the outbound and return flight appear beneath the fare along with the return date.

Clicking on a fare shows you the flight timings and details and allows you to check the availability of this fare. Since the fares displayed here are only indicative (they're actually based on the cheapest fares our users find each day), it's possible they aren't available any more. Then again, you might find a cheaper fare given the roller-coaster ride airfares have been on.

We hope you like the new calendar. We know many people have been waiting for round trip functionality in the calendar and we're happy to make it available today. Go ahead, give it a spin »

• Best fares from Mumbai to Goa
• Best fares from Delhi to Goa
• Best fares from Mumbai to Bangalore
• Best fares from Delhi to Bangalore
• Best fares from Bangalore to Pune

The graph below visualises what the roller-coaster looked like for the first half of 2009. The blue line shows the average daily airfare from January 1st until June 21st. The average price has been calculated based on our daily bookings across all sectors.

• High: Rs. 4,409 on February 14th (Special Valentine's day pricing, perhaps?)
• Low: Rs. 2,711 on January 30th
• Average: Rs. 3,846

February and March were the months with the wildest fluctuations in pricing, with relatively steady pricing in April and May. June was again witness to large fluctuations.

The interesting thing here is that the price cuts don't last very long at all, so when the price falls, people should take advantage and book immediately. If you're on Twitter, follow @Cleartrip, we always update our Twitter status every time there's a crazy price drop to notify our customers that it's a great time to book.

Should they be doing more? What and why?

[via UberCEO]

We wanted to bring the user interface for the Cleartrip Account in line with some of the design patterns and standards that have recently emerged through most of our other products.

We also wanted to make some of the powerful tools available from inside your Cleartrip Account more discoverable, such as the trip tools you can see in the screenshot below:

We hope you like the new design, we certainly think it's a big improvement over the previous one.

ClearTrip.com took my money and DID NOT book my ticket to Malaysia. Had a harrowing experience at airport. http://is.gd/TtH6

Within a short period of time, 40 new Twitter status updates were posted. Some were simply 'retweeting' Kiruba's update; while others were demanding explanations, crucifying Cleartrip or pushing their own personal agendas.

As a customer-centric company, we are on Twitter to help our customers. We're also a company that places a very high premium on being transparent and honest with our customers; and this blog post is a blow-by-blow explanation of everything that happened here.

We'd like to state at the outset that we're not holding anything back here and even though there were various parties that contributed to the screw-up, we took complete ownership for resolving our customer's problem. That said, here goes...

As soon as we noticed Kiruba's original post, we swung into action. We apologised to Kiruba on Twitter and informed him that we were looking into the issue immediately.

We retrieved details about the reservation from our internal system and found that there were three distinct mistakes made by all three parties involved in the transaction:

1. Kiruba had booked an international ticket using a name that did not match with the name on his passport. Had we ticketed the reservation with the incorrect name, he would have been turned away by the airline at time of check-in and Kiruba would have had no one to blame but himself.
2. Cleartrip saw the mismatch in names, voided the original ticket and issued a new ticket and PNR for the name as written in the passport, but slipped up in informing Kiruba about his new ticket and PNR number.
3. When Kiruba showed up at the airline check-in counter, the airline informed him that his ticket was void, resulting in Kiruba purchasing a new ticket. Had the airline simply done a search for the passenger name, they would have seen that Kiruba actually had a new reservation within the system, but they didn't bother.

The above three reasons caused what we now refer to as the 'Kiruba incident.'

Once we had identified what happened, we reached Kiruba via telephone in Kuala Lumpur and reassured him that his return trip was completely confirmed and that he would have no problems at the airport.

Despite the fact that other parties had contributed to the screw up, we took complete ownership of the problem; we even went above and beyond the call of duty. Not only did we refund Kiruba for the ticket he had to buy at the airport, we paid from our own pocket for Kiruba and his wife to be upgraded to business class for their return journey.

Many Twitter users demanded an explanation about how this could happen and we hope this blog post serves as an adequate explanation of everything that happened and everything that Cleartrip did to make things right for our customer.

Aside: While there were over 40 negative posts about this on Twitter, there were only 5 positive posts. Why is social media such a hotbed of negativity? Reminds us of this line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where Mark Antony says "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

We've previously posted 3 reasons why loyalty programs in the travel industry suck. And it seems that customers agree--the data above is straight from the horse's mouth and shows that loyalty programs in the travel industry are a fading star. Almost as many people care about the quality of the food as they do about their frequent flyer memberships--maybe airlines should spend on improving the food instead of on flyer miles?

Loyalty programs completely are completely failing to create any actual customer loyalty and are weighing down airline balance sheets with massive liabilities. Should airlines be considering junking their loyalty programs?

This (oversimplified) diagram provides a snapshot of the airline industry's supply chain--airlines are the suppliers on the top; customers are at the bottom and intermediaries are sandwiched in-between.

Let's take a quick look at the roles of each of the players in the ecosystem:

• Airlines are the ultimate suppliers in the chain. Their role is pretty obvious, so we won't go into it much here. Each airline has a Computerised Reservation System (CRS) and all transactions ultimately have to take place within an airline's CRS.
• GDSs or Global Distribution Systems are the largest airline intermediaries. Only a handful of GDSs exist in the world--Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan are the world's largest and most popular GDSs. The role of the GDS is that of a centralised clearinghouse for data from an airline CRS--fares, schedules and availability for most of the world's airlines is available from each GDS. GDSs enable travel agents to query and transact with multiple airlines through a single interface. This is critical as an agent's productivity would disintegrate if he had to use discrete systems for each operating airline. GDSs charge airlines a flat distribution fee for each ticket booked through their systems. Some airline, specifically those operating the "no-frills" or "low-cost" models choose not to distribute through GDSs as their business models do not support the per-ticket costs incurred for GDS bookings.
• Consolidators act as "distributors" for airlines. Most consolidators started out as travel agents; as they grew in size, they negotiated better rates with airlines and began distributing these better deals to smaller travel agents that did not have access to the same rates. Consolidators earn commissions and also earn a "bonus" on the basis of their ticket volumes. So, an airline will give a consolidator volume targets and then pay them a "bonus" if they meet their targets. Consolidators, in turn, share their commissions and bonuses with the smaller travel agents in their networks.
• Travel agents come in all shapes and sizes ranging from small mom-and-pop shops, large scale online travel companies, travel management companies that cater only to business travellers and tour operators that sell group travel. All travel agents deal directly with customers and earn money through commissions, service fees and bonuses from airlines or consolidators.

This next (oversimplified) diagram depicts the various channels available to customers for researching and purchasing their airline tickets as well as how the various systems interact. The orange lines represent data and transactions flowing between the various systems, while the blue lines represent customer interactions with the available channels.

We hope this post has provided some basic background to the structure of the airline industry.

1. If you're reading an article, you can't see who wrote the article without scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the article--and sometimes, that's a long scroll! On a content site where various authors are contributing, I might want to know who wrote an article upfront; before I invest the time in reading it. This style also assumes that visitors arrive at the article page through the home page or the various section pages. If I arrived at an article directly from a search engine, the design doesn't let me know immediately that the article may have been written by someone I'm already familiar with.
2. Authors seem to be getting the short stick on ThinkVitamin--neither the home page, nor the section level pages let you see who wrote an article. At the risk of repeating myself, the site should be doing more to highlight their authors. Many of ThinkVitamin's contributors are well respect members of the web community and featuring their names more prominently throughout the site will probably lead to increased readership for their content.
3. Section headers within an article look anything but--in fact, they look more like they're dividing up the page into various discrete pieces. The effect is even more pronounced because the site is largely styled as a blog. Everything within the article block is marked up as an h3, regardless of whether it is meta-data or second level headline.

A video of the "painting" in progress is available here.

Every once in a while, it's useful to remind ourselves that play is critical to creativity.

[via Think Vitamin]