About eight months ago, when we were readying to launch Expressway, many of us had doubts about whether the Indian market was ready for such a product. We wondered whether customers would feel comfortable storing their card details online. Optimism prevailed over skepticism and we launched Expressway at the end of March 2012.

And, boy, do we feel vindicated now. Expressway has witnessed tremendous growth along every metric that matters since we launched it. And the growth shows no signs of slowing down at all. Expressway users have more than quadrupled since April and doubled since June 2012.

The percentage of bookings made with Expressway has also risen steadily, although it peaked in May when we were running an introductory discount for Expressway bookings. Over 10% of all bookings on Cleartrip are now made with Expressway.

Interestingly, there’s a marked difference in Expressway adoption on the website versus on mobile devices — it has grown more rapidly on mobile; and the gap continues to widen. In fact, almost one-fourth of all mobile bookings are made with Expressway. This comes as no surprise as Expressway was the first product that was launched on mobile first (as Express Checkout), and then made available on all devices after seeing the adoption on mobile.

Another interesting nugget we came across was the split of credit card type among Expressway users. As many as 20% of Expressway bookings are made using American Express cards — a significantly higher percentage than that for non-Expressway bookings.

We’ve been delighted with how many customers are using Expressway to make their travel bookings even simpler. It has surpassed our own expectations and goes to prove what we’ve always wanted to believe: that the Indian digital consumer is far more discerning than most Indian companies think.

Almost eight months ago, we published SEO flying higher at Cleartrip to share some insights of progress over a twelve month period. Last month, we completed two years of dedicated SEO work and we created a new infographic to share the results with our internal teams. This is the original version of the graph we created – the focus of the data is on the contribution of SEO to business growth over the last two years.

We’ve experienced a steep rise in our organic (non-brand keyword) search traffic contribution – rising from a humble 7% in August 2010 to 24% in August 2012, coupled with a 5X increase in the volume. We’ve also seen good growth in the internal product searches with a 8X and 6X jump in international flights and hotel searches respectively. The last 2 years have been challenging but exciting, demanding but ardent, strenuous but rewarding. Stay tuned for more insights into our SEO efforts.

We all know that airfares are increasing. We can feel that we are paying much more to fly than we were a couple of years ago, or even twelve months ago. But exactly how much have airfares increased over the past couple of years, and why? We decided to try and find out by looking at some hard data, and came up with some interesting conclusions.

The one reason airlines cite most often for rising airfares is the increasing price of aviation turbine fuel (ATF). We plotted the average monthly one way fare for Delhi to Mumbai (arguably the most popular domestic sector in India) against the average monthly wholesale price index (WPI) of aviation turbine fuel, for the period between January 2009 and August 2012. And we did find a pretty strong correlation between the two, with a significant positive correlation coefficient of 0.67. But there’s more going on beneath the surface.

We found three key shifts in airfare during this period – in October 2009, November 2011 and May 2012. And they mapped pretty neatly to three key events at these times, which had a significant and long-lasting effect on airfares. In September 2009, Jet Airways suffered a 5-day strike by nearly half of its pilots. The other airlines raked in the moolah at Jet Airways’ expense, by increasing ticket prices for last-minute flyers. In October 2009, the average Delhi-Mumbai one-way fare breached the Rs 4,000 mark. And although this was not the first time it did so, airfares have never fallen below Rs 4,000 since (except very briefly in July 2011). The COO of one airline summed it up nicely, saying “All the industry needs is for one major airline to go out of business, and the rest of us will be fine.”

Those words turned out to be particularly prescient, at least as far as airfares were concerned. Just over two years later, in November 2011, Kingfisher’s debt and karma caught up with the airline, and it started cutting capacity in earnest. Once again, the other airlines decided to make hay while the sun shines, and Delhi-Mumbai one-way fare crossed Rs 5,000, never to look back. With one major airline looking likely to go out of business, the others started being fine.

The next major bump to airfares came in May 2012, this time thanks to regulators, not airlines. That’s when the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA) decided to increase the user development fee payable at IGI Airport, New Delhi by 346 per cent. As a result, average fares touched Rs 7,000, and haven’t looked back since.

So there you have it – a couple of supply shocks and a huge bump in UDF for Delhi are the biggest factors that have led to rising airfares on the Delhi-Mumbai route. We were curious about what effect, if any, these rising airfares are having on the seemingly relentless growth of air passenger traffic in India. And sure enough, we found a connection. In Jan-June 2010, total domestic air traffic in India grew by 22.67% over the corresponding period in 2009. This growth rate slipped to 17% in Jan-June 2011. And in Jan-June 2012, domestic air traffic grew by only 3.56% compared to the same period last year. Of course, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But considering that aviation contributes as much as 1.5% of our GDP, all of this is certainly not good news for the Indian economy.

Imagine Spain playing a football match. While the glory of the goal belongs to a Torres or a Silva, would the goal even be possible without an Iniesta or a Xavi? Football may not be an obvious analogy for Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but it is an apt one — the ‘last click’ is the striker that gets a customer to a site, but without assists from earlier clicks and assisted keywords, the ‘goals’ are impossible.

SEM has long been an essential tool to drive leads, acquisitions and calls for online businesses. Building the right keyword pool and optimising for the best performing keywords has always been the domain of any search manager, but the definition of ‘best performing’ can sometimes be too direct. Does the last click end up getting more credit than it is due at the expense of earlier clicks during the research process?

We think so, and the data confirms it: 43% of global paid search conversions included more than one paid click (source: Google AdWords). We see a similar pattern in the purchase cycle of flights and hotels for our customers.

The data clearly shows that a user enters ‘research mode’ well before an actual conversion event takes place. During this research phase, a user makes little distinction between organic and sponsored links; to her all the links on the page are Google’s ‘search results’. Thus, for a marketer, it’s as important to be visible when the research happens as it is to be visible at the time of purchase. This is further borne out by the role of assisted keywords:

All this is before conversion. What about after? Every medium has a beta effect on a parallel medium, and the case here is no different. Just as offline TV campaigns can impact direct traffic in a big way, SEM campaigns add to non-paid traffic in their own way.

The lesson of the day: analyse and optimise based on both, the impressions (first click) and the conversions (last click). You will then have a ‘World XI’ team that rakes in the goals every time they go out to play.

Apple previewed iOS 6 in June at WWDC and launched it on September 19th, making updates available over-the-air and through iTunes.

iOS 6 offers over 200 new features; including Facebook integration, expanded Siri capabilities, shared Photo Streams, Passbook and more. While many of these new features have been well received, Apple’s new Maps app has failed to impress even the most zealous fans.

We know just how hard it is to please everyone with a new product release; and, as expected, Apple’s new Maps perform excruciatingly poorly in India. Given this, we were curious to see if the Maps debacle was enough to deter people from upgrading to iOS 6.

So, we poked around our mobile traffic stats and here’s what we found…

Prior to its September 19th launch, iOS 6 constituted a negligible 0.2% of the iOS traffic share to our mobile site. On the first day of its release, iOS 6′s share clocked in at 6%. Another four days later, iOS 6 surged to almost a 25% share.

Considering that none of the devices already in the market had this OS by default, and users had to proactively upgrade to it, we can safely conclude that the market has voted decidedly in favour of the other 199 new features on offer.

At the time of going to press, the two most recent versions of iOS (iOS 5.1.x & iOS 6) have a combined contribution of 75% of iOS traffic to our mobile site.

Having answered that question, we took a quick look to see how adoption rates for Android fare in comparison.

Here’s the standings, toe to toe, for iOS and Android adoption rates.

Android’s latest OS Jelly Bean 4.1.x released over two months ago; has a measly 1.8% share of the Android market so far. Over a year has passed since the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, but its share still hovers at just 28% — a milestone that iOS6 will surpass in just another couple of days.

Even in a market like India (which barely registers on Apple’s radar and where one of iOS 6′s tentpole features, Maps, pretty much doesn’t work at all), the adoption curves for iOS releases are hugely impressive.

As someone recently quipped, Apple has this OS upgrade thing down.

 

Have you ever been surprised by how much airlines charge to reschedule a flight? Or shocked to hear that a few kilos of excess baggage will cost you a few thousand rupees? So have we. And we have often found ourselves wishing for an easier way to find out about these charges than rummaging through dozens of pages on airline websites.

So we went ahead and created one. We extracted all ‘ancillary’ fees from deep within the bowels of airline websites, and put them all in one easy-to-use guide that covers the fees charged by every airline in India. Here’s an excerpt:

Airline	Rescheduling fee (Domestic)	Cancellation fee (Domestic)
Indigo	Rs 1,000 / passenger / sector	Rs 1,000 / passenger / sector
Jet Airways	Rs 250 – 997 (Premiere); Rs 500 – 1,050 (Economy)	Rs 500 – 997 (Premiere); Rs 750 – 1,050 (Economy)
JetKonnect	Rs 250 – 997 (Premiere); Rs 500 – 1,050 (Economy)	Rs 500 – 997 (Premiere); Rs 750 – 1,050 (Economy)
SpiceJet	Rs 950 / passenger / sector	Rs 950 / passenger / sector
GoAir	Rs 950 (GoSmart); NIL (GoFlexi & GoBusiness)	Rs 950 (GoSmart); Rs 350 (GoFlexi); NIL (GoBusiness, >24 hrs); Rs 750 (GoBusiness, <24 hrs)
Air India	Rs 750 – NIL (Economy, based on fare class); NIL (Executive / First class)	Rs 500 – NO REFUND (Economy, based on fare class); Rs 200 (Executive / First class)
Kingfisher	Rs 950 (Kingfisher Red); Rs 500 – 950 (Kingfisher, Kingfisher First)	Rs 950 (Kingfisher Red); Rs 500 – 100% base fare (Kingfisher, Kingfisher First)

You can download the complete PDF guide here: Guide to Airline Fees in India

[Update] IndiGo have revised their rescheduling and cancellation fees with effect from 19 September 2012. We have updated the guide accordingly.