India embarks on e-travel
For a country with immense tourist potential ( cribbers forget international tourists, we have a huge domestic potential) , India hardly has good online travel sites. US was a paradise that way with Expedia & Travelocity.
But all that is going to change now. With VC money pouring into the country, some good e-travel sites are on the cards. Red Herring carries an article on India's upcoming e-travel sites. Watch out for these websites in the near future - Yatra , Cleartrip , Travelguru ( An HBS idea which is already functional). This is great news for travel freaks like me !
For a country with immense tourist potential ( cribbers forget international tourists, we have a huge domestic potential) , India hardly has good online travel sites. US was a paradise that way with Expedia & Travelocity.
But all that is going to change now. With VC money pouring into the country, some good e-travel sites are on the cards. Red Herring carries an article on India's upcoming e-travel sites. Watch out for these websites in the near future - Yatra , Cleartrip , Travelguru ( An HBS idea which is already functional). This is great news for travel freaks like me !
posted by Cogito at
Sunday, February 19, 2006
5 Comments:
I helped create a travel portal a couple of years ago in India, will avoid balatant self-promotion here......so I know what you mean....but the big problem facing Indian portals is that the number of credit card payments online are too small, unless you have very high visibility. Which means more moolah has to be put into advertising.
The number of big players in the Indian travel space is quite small compared to the US et all, and there are a lot of small players with their own websites. But these websites end up being little more than online billboards, because there is no real "business" happening on it. The amountof transactions is simply not enough to justify the cost of putting an online payment system in place, and tying it to Galileo or Amadeus or whatever.
By
Anonymous, at 1:16 PM
Cogito,
I'm one of the founders of Cleartrip and I'm glad to see that you're looking forward to the creation of an online travel environment.
We're working hard to make sure we don't disappoint people like you when our site goes live.
I will look forward to your first visit to our site, whenever we're ready and launched.
cheers
Hrush
By
Anonymous, at 2:49 PM
Mitali - Thx for the comment. With the new found affluence and will to travel, we might just be getting the critical mass for these sites to start making money .
Hrush -- All the best for the venture ! You can count me as a regular visitor .
By
Cogito, at 9:44 PM
Travelguru website is crap.... I can get better rates from my travel agent or directly calling the airline reservation.... a RT which would cost me less than 5K is costing me 11K if I price it through Travelguru.. I hope that atleast cleartrip and the other website come up with a reasonably fair (pun intended) engine.
By
Anonymous, at 5:59 PM
Cogito - Once again, thank you for your support, I hope we'll get active feedback from you so that we can continue to create more satisfaction for people like you, travel freaks. We're all travel freaks here.
I hope you're signed up to our announcements list, so you'll be the first to know when things go live.
Anonymous - I can't speak for Travelguru, but every single Cleartripper doing everything to ensure that the prices you see at Cleartrip are no different than what your traditional travel agent would give you.
We can't guarantee that the prices will be EXACTLY the same, but we categorically WILL NOT tolerate a 6,000 rupee difference. A couple of hundred rupees difference is acceptable.
By
Anonymous, at 9:21 PM
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