Airline yield management is the reason that two people sitting next to each other on a flight may have paid dramatically different prices for the privilege of getting from here to there. It's also the reason that airfares keep changing from day to day and, sometimes, from minute to minute.

The world of yield management is complex with sophisticated pricing techniques that factor in historical performance, seasonality, number of unsold seats on an aircraft and anything else that a yield manager thinks will have an impact.

With its comprehensive visual display of fares, Cleartrip Graphs has always been a great tool for finding the perfect flight when travel dates are flexible. It's also a great way to look at how airlines are managing their yield and where they're doing it.

Take a look at the graphs below:

A volatile graph indicates that an airline is pursuing an aggressive yield management strategy. It's interesting to see how flat the graphs above look. Are India's airlines not pursuing aggressive yield management strategies at all?

See for yourself:

• Mumbai--New Delhi airfare graph
• Bangalore--New Delhi airfare graph
• Mumbai--New Delhi airfare graph
• New Delhi--Bangalore airfare graph
• Mumbai--Goa airfare graph

[via Ram Badrinathan, Travel Analyst & Amateur yield manager]

We had a great response with very useful feedback. So, a couple of days ago we launched international flight bookings on Cleartrip.com.

We've always prized simplicity, elegance and sophistication; and our new flight search is no different--we've gone the extra mile for our customers. We use the world's most sophisticated search algorithms to provide access to a wide selection of affordable flights.

Cleartrip's international flights launch required a small change to our flight search form:

There's no longer a dropdown menu to select destinations--with Cleartrip going international, there's a lot of destinations and trying to put them into a dropdown menu would have slowed things down dramatically.

With hundreds of flights to choose from, Cleartrip is the only site to give customers complete control--empowering you to filter, sort, slice and dice flight results, making it simple to pick the perfect flight.

Finding a needle in a haystack has never been easier.

We hope you love Cleartrip's international flight search--we certainly do. We'll be publishing some more details and tips here over the next couple of days, so stay tuned.

Happy flying.

We've had a great second year, Cleartrip's range of products has come a long way. Along with dozens of continuous improvements to our older products, Cleartrip added a few new things along the way including:

• A much needed train search for the Indian Railways
• Air fare graphs that let you compare airlines and fares over a range of dates with a graph
• Hotel directory for India to let you quickly see all hotels in India's cities along with maps, hotel information, prices and more
• Acceptance of debit cards and international credit cards as well as the ability to pay via net-banking
• Customised email alerts for airfares
• Travel RSS feeds for flights and hotels
• International flight search

Nothing makes us happier than happy customers and giving them more Cleartrip products to help them plan and buy travel. We've got some fantastic things planned for this year--it's a real privilege to serve the Cleartrip customer and we plan to keep the flag flying high in the coming year.

03:04:05 06-07-08

This won't happen again in your lifetime, ever.

If you'd like to use Citibank's online banking to pay for your travel, more details are available at the Cleartrip Forum. In addition to Citibank, net banking support is also available for ICICI and HDFC.

Happy travels.

Cleartrip's international flight search equips you with an exhaustive set of filters to help narrow down the results and pick the perfect flight. There's filters for everything you would consider while selecting a flight:

• Airlines
• Number of stops
• Airports (for places that have more than one airport e.g. London)
• Stopover duration (how long you have to wait at airports on the way)
• Price range
• Departure time range
• Arrival time range

The international search filters are significantly more advanced than our domestic search filters due to the complexity of flight itineraries and greater number of flight options available. The most significant change is that the filters are now collapsible--you can hide any particular set of controls with a click; the position of the arrow indicates whether a given filter is visible or not.

Experienced travellers know that cheap fares often hide horrific itineraries -- hours and hours waiting at an airport, too many stopovers, airlines you didn't think you were booking, bad timings... the list goes on. Cleartrip's flight filters let you tailor your itinerary to perfection. Use the filters to narrow your search, they're a big help.

In addition to filtering, sorting for flight results is available by airline, number of stops, arrival & departure times, flight duration and, of course, price. All sorting is available in ascending and descending order, the direction of the arrow indicates the sort order--up for ascending and down for descending.

In a nutshell, Cleartrip’s new air search gives you complete control over every aspect of your itinerary, allowing you to find exactly the right flight for your trip.

We decided to go with a single search form for flights, here's what the new form looks like:

We considered a few options for this such as making users click a radio button to choose between international and domestic flights or having a few radio buttons for most frequently searched destinations in addition to a text field for "other."

In the end, we concluded that a single search form with a plain text input field for the destination was the simplest and fastest way for users.

Up next, we'll provide an overview of the various filtering and sorting options available in the international flight search.

Adding support for international flights has consistently been one of our number one customer requests. The Cleartrip team has been hard at work to bring this to life--starting today, you can search for flights from India to any of the world's destinations. The search is currently available as a public beta--you will only be able to search for flights; in just a few days we will allow you to book these flights online. We're not expecting too many issues, but we want to iron out any unexpected problems that arise before we enable online bookings.

As always, we've been internally testing and refining Cleartrip's international flight search for some time now. We're very happy with the way it's turned out. We believe in delivering the best possible experience to our customers and the new flight search offers an unmatched set of tools and features to help you find the perfect flight to your destination.

Over the next couple of days, we'll be publishing a series of posts detailing the various new features and tools available in Cleartrip's international flight search. Give us your feedback at link, we'd love to hear what you think.

Online bookings will be available in just a few days, so stay tuned to this blog for an announcement soon.

Before we made this change, the maximum number of adults you could book simultaneously for was 4. Happy flying.

That is a real headline from a real newspaper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

No kidding.

[via Jacqui Cheng]