“Why is programming fun? The sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things.”
~ Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
Pricewatch: Your money back when prices fall
Airline pricing is volatile — like death and taxes, this much is certain; particularly for international travel. International airfares fluctuate wildly in response to factors such as revenue management algorithms, oil prices, exchange rates and more. In a nut: it’s a pain in the neck to book an international flight without worrying about whether you nailed the best price or not.
Never fear, Cleartrip is here — we come to work everyday to take the crap out of travel; to make travel something you look forward to instead of something you worry about.
So, today, we’re bringing you Pricewatch — your money back when prices fall. Now you never have to worry about whether you booked the best price or not.
Pricewatch works for international flights only.
As soon as you book an international flight on Cleartrip, Pricewatch kicks in and begins monitoring airfares for your trip. If the fares for the flights you’ve booked falls by more than the associated change fees, Pricewatch automatically reprices your tickets to give you the cheaper fare. And, of course, Pricewatch automatically gives you money back to the tune of the difference.
For example, let’s say you booked a one-way Mumbai – London flight on British Airways (BA 138) today for Rs. 32,000 for departure on the Ides of March (March 15). Pricewatch will immediately begin tracking the cheapest fare for your flight (BA 138). And, let’s say the fare drops to Rs. 27,000 before your departure date with an additional Rs. 2,000 as the airline amendment fees. Pricewatch will automatically rebook the user on the cheaper fare and refund you Rs. 3,000.
| You paid | Rs. 32,000 |
| Current fare | Rs. 27,000 |
| Amendment fee | Rs. 2,000 |
| New total | Rs. 29,000 (27,000 + 2,000) |
| Your refund | Rs. 3,000 (32,000 – 29,000) |
Sometimes, when Pricewatch reprices and rebooks a flight, the PNR changes; if this happens Pricewatch will email you a new e-ticket.
International travel is often about the mystery of the unknown, but we’d like to keep the suspense confined to your destination. With Pricewatch, we want to take the uncertainty out of booking your international tickets, so you can book without worrying if the price is right. You focus on your trip, let Pricewatch worry about your price.
The second largest billboard in the world
Historically, we’ve never been big on outdoor advertising — we just don’t think it’s a good use of our marketing budget; particularly not for the Indian market. But different markets call for different approaches. We’ve been operating Cleartrip.ae for over two years now and when we were looking at ways to invest in our brand for the UAE market, we couldn’t resist grabbing the opportunity to hoist one of the largest billboards the world has ever seen.
Located on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, the Cleartrip.ae billboard measures an astounding 77.5 m x 61.5 m (254.3 ft x 201.8 ft), with an area of 4,766 square metres. To put that in perspective, the area of a tennis court is approximately 261 square metres. So this billboard is the equivalent of 18 tennis courts, and almost as big as a football field mounted vertically on a building. Given its size, it comes as no surprise that it is visible to people from as far away as 3 kilometres. According to the Guinness World Records, this is the second largest outdoor billboard in the world — just a shade smaller than the largest, which is in Hong Kong and has an area of 5,033 square metres.
Needless to say, producing and mounting a billboard of this size was a gargantuan undertaking in itself. The panels took 6 days of non-stop work to print. Installing the billboard was another 10 days of work due to wind conditions that made it too hazardous for workers to go up in the trolleys to install the panels.
Here’s what the world’s second largest billboard looks like:
The Cleartrip Small World contest
We’re in the mood for some fun today, so we’re going to run a travel-trivia contest on Twitter. So here it is — The Cleartrip Small World contest.
Here’s how it works:
- We’ll ask 10 questions on Twitter, whose answers can be found in Small World. Every tweet about the contest (including the questions) will include the hashtag #WorldIsSmall, so look out for it on Twitter.
- Find the answer on Small World, and tweet it to us. Remember to include the hashtag #WorldIsSmall in your responses. Don’t worry, we won’t make the questions too difficult and we’ll also throw in a hint or two to help you along.
- Pay attention, this bit is important: In addition to the answer and the hashtag, your response must include the URL or screenshot of the Small World page where you found the answer.
- Answering all the questions correctly will go a long way towards getting you the prize.
- Being the first person to answer a question correctly will earn you extra credit.
- There’s bonus credit for tagging your friends and spreading the word about the contest.
At the end of the contest, we’ll pick 3 winners, who will get a non-trivial prize of gift vouchers worth Rs 5,000 each, that can be used for hotel bookings on Cleartrip.
UPDATE: This contest is now closed.
All your Cleartrip tickets now on Passbook
The travel industry is one of the largest contributors to worldwide environmental damage — a single Mumbai-London flight produces as much carbon dioxide as a year’s worth of driving. At Cleartrip, we’re very conscious of the environmental footprint of this industry and we’re always looking at little ways in which we can help reduce the impact.
Today, we’re happy to be making a small, but meaningful contribution — paperless tickets for your smartphone. Save the planet, go paperless — Cleartrip now supports Passbook for flight, hotel and train bookings.
Featuring a nifty design, Cleartrip passes display important information about your trip upfront with additional details on the reverse of the pass.
With location and time-based Passbook notifications, your passes will automatically pop-up on your smartphone’s screen, ready for use just when they’re needed.
All confirmation emails sent by Cleartrip now have a pass file attached in addition to the PDF ticket. In addition, passes are available from within your Cleartrip Account through your desktop or mobile browser.
Passes have been designed to conform to Apple guidelines and are available for iPhone and iPod Touch devices running iOS6 or higher and any Mac running OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2 or later). In addition, the passes are also supported on Android through third-party apps like PassWallet and other third-party apps with Passbook support available from the Google Play store.
Note: Flight passes cannot currently be used as a substitute for a printed boarding pass.
On finicking with trifles
“To anyone who finds that linguistic study is a worthless finicking with trifles, I would reply that life consists of little things; the important matter is to see them largely.”
~ Otto Jespersen
[From The Chronicle via Daring Fireball]
Small World – Under the Hood
A few weeks back we launched a significant rewrite and redesign of Small World. At Cleartrip, we’ve always been big believers in sharing the technology and design details in our products; and in this post, we’re going to delve into the core infrastructure behind Small World.
Small World is and always will be a global product; that is, you can research and plan an international trip on Small World as easily as you can a domestic one. There is a massive amount of data underlying Small World — we have 150 countries in our database with more than 50 Points of Interest (POIs) each. The top 50 countries in Small World contain a total of over 250,000 POIs in categories such as sights, restaurants, bars, hotels and shopping options. In addition, Small World has written guides for over 40,000 unique destinations and POIs.
In technical terms Small World today consists of a database of places and custom geo-spatial search technology built to make the data accessible to our users. The core of the places database comes from Yahoo’s Geoplanet which has over 7 million data points. We considered the other usual suspect in the space – Geonames, but rejected it because of its complex taxonomy and a lack of hierarchy. To the Geoplanet core we added additional place data and information from a number of free sources such as Wikipedia and Wikitravel and a number of commercial sources such Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet, Zomato and our own hotel database. All of our data sources can be refreshed at will. Automated tasks manage almost all of the de-duplication and data normalisation. Our automation efforts are supplemented by a suite of tools that let us hand-tune the data where needed.
The Small World user experience is heavy on photos. Images are sourced from free sources such as Wikipedia, Panoramio, and Flickr (only those that are made available by the owners under liberal licences). We believe that manual curation does not scale, and we are hard at work to improve the quality of photos we display.
Having raw data about destinations and points of interest is only part of the problem. How do we respond to user queries? Anyone who has tried it knows that doing Search right is hard. We wanted to build a robust, well engineered platform, and in that quest we found a lot of inspiration from the SPIRIT (Spatially Aware Information Retrieval on the Internet) Project in particular. Although we did not find any reusable software or even implementable solutions or results there, the various reports and documentation from the project helped us frame the problem properly, which is a significant achievement in itself.
The high level content processing pipeline and search architecture looks something like the picture below:
Our geospatial search is built around Apache Lucene, a powerful and flexible open source search toolkit. We have built a flexible query parser, a domain-specific language, and matching and relevance customisations that allow us to go beyond the vector-space model, making ranking, filtering and faceting changes as simple as updating configuration files.
Luckily for us most of the data from Geoplanet has lat/long information. The geospatial index allows us to support user queries like Restaurants near Statue of Liberty, or Hotels near Taj Mahal. The geospatial index also powers the What’s nearby widget in all the guide pages.
Small World is still a hobby for us and we’re going to continue to chip away at this important problem. We have encountered many hard technical challenges, some of which are still unsolved. One problem that plagues all software in this field is that of data normalisation. Without clean data, nifty search algorithms don’t amount to much. We have learnt a lot about the issues involved and have achieved a good level of automation, but there’s still miles to go. Another problem which is a wide open area of research is to algorithmically select photos of high relevance and aesthetic quality. Yet another area is automated grouping of destinations and points of interest into itineraries and “similarity” buckets.
Do these problem excite you? Would you like to be a part of a cool team attacking these problems? Write to me with a link to your LinkedIn profile and github account! Remember, powering people’s daydreams is serious business!
Cleartrip Mobile is now on Google Play
It’s an early Christmas for Android users this year, Cleartrip Mobile is now available on Google Play. Cleartrip Mobile for Android offers our entire suite of travel products on your mobile phone.
All your globe trotting is just taps away with the best international flight booking experience and a choice of over 113,000 hotels in the palm of your hand. In addition, exclusive last-minute hotel deals for same-day check-ins are also available with Quickeys.
If you travel by train, you’re going to be one happy camper — you can now catch all your trains from the same platform, and you now get them at the same price as you would on IRCTC because we’ve removed the service fee for Android users. To book trains, make sure you connect your IRCTC and Cleartrip accounts first.
Finally, you get complete access to all your booked trips when you are on the move and one-touch payments and bookings with Expressway.
We know that many of our customers have been disappointed in the fact that we haven’t delivered an Android App and Android is the largest smartphone platform in India. So, instead of having our customers continue the waiting game, we decided to judo it and bring something to market faster by using our HTML5-based mobile product as the base.
Download Cleartrip Mobile today on Google Play
Cleartrip Video Stamps: which is your favourite?
A couple of weeks ago, we launched our new TV campaign, featuring short and sweet video stamps. Here are the four video stamps we created, along with the names we’ve lovingly given them.
The Dog one – this started out as the Trips one, but somewhere along the way it just became the ‘Dog one’, we don’t really know why.
The Hotels one
The Flights one
The Trains one
While our video stamps have been widely appreciated, what really matters is the verdict from our customers. So tell us in the poll below, which one is your favourite?
What did you love about them? What would you change? We’d love to hear in the comments.
Why we fired our PR agency
Yesterday, we had the unpleasant task of firing our Public Relations agency, Buzz PR. We fired them because they were spamming our customers. At Cleartrip, we do not spam our customers or anyone else, ever. Period. There is no negotiating this.
Here’s what happened.
At around 4 pm, we came across this Tweet from @jackerhack:
@cleartrip Got mailed by Perfect Relations again. This is really a Hotel California situation now. /cc: @surdattack @gonsalves_r
— Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack) December 4, 2012
We had provided @jackerhack’s email to Buzz PR a few months ago when we launched an update to our mobile site. As part of the launch, we had invited a few select bloggers and customers to our offices to give them a sneak preview of the product before it launched. Buzz PR coordinated these invites for us, that’s why we gave them the email addresses of these bloggers and customers.
Buzz PR then proceeded to amalgamate the email addresses of our contacts and customers into their own email announcements list. These people, who trusted us, soon started receiving all kinds of emails from Buzz PR that had nothing to do with Cleartrip.
Prior to yesterday, @jackerhack had pointed out to us on two separate occasions that he was being spammed by Buzz PR. On each of those occasions we had strong words with Buzz PR and asked them to ensure this never happened again. Yesterday, it happened again.
There was no point in having another conversation with Buzz PR asking them to stop this. Around 7 pm, we sent them a brief email firing them. Three strikes.
We’re drawing a line in the sand here — we do not and will not spam our customers. Ever. And we certainly will not tolerate any of our partners spamming them. We’re only sorry we gave them three strikes, we should have fired them sooner.
And to everyone else that ever received spammy emails from Buzz PR because we shared your email address with them, we’re deeply sorry. None of our future partners will ever make this mistake again.