Online Flight Booking, India

As domestic flights have become cheap (is it so ???), travel portals are a big hit in India.... almost 5 to 6 portals are been seen, some are really good , some with bad interface but have very customer friendly approach. So which of these websites holds a key or strike a chord to survive in this competitive travel business, I have used almost all of them, so let me just recall on each of them and what it lacks and what's so good about them.

ClearTrip.com

Good Experience

• Here is one portal which is a treat to every traveller, and this is also talked by many UI guys for its clear and precise transaction and booking navigation.
• Firstly this site has no ads and flashing banners and all that false travel promices that every site gives, buy one get one free.... conditions apply sort of nonsence, so here what we see is just the booking parameters and thats it. See it book it and close it...
• Next step is you are directed to a even much better screen wherein you have the power to modify even in this stage without even refreshing the whole session, AJAX technology maybe
• Transaction page are split in 4 steps in same page, in 5 minutes you are through.
• Now thats what I call quick booking

Bad Experience

• One of the major drawbacks of clear trip is that once you book a ticket they (cleartrip people) can't modify or reschedule, which is bad. You need to call up the airline guys to do so, these guys should take up this responsinility.
• eTicket comes to you email very late, some 30 -40 minutes after you book, which is very late I mean if you are eagerly awaiting the ticket for printouts.
• Customer care is bit laid back and their so called TOLL FREE number dosen't work, you need to shell out money to call their land line number in Mumbai.

Makemytrip.com

Good Experience

• Not that pleasing interface, very similar to all other travel portals, but what differs from others is their process (internal process) is quick, prompt responce and quick eTicket delivery.
• You get eTicket in a blink of seconds after you book a ticket, at times you will be surprised to see eTicket reaching so fastly in your email.
• This is the only Portal which alows, cancellation and modification of ticket anytime (I mean except 4 hours before travel time), however for modification you need to call them up, but cancellation happens through internet (need to check on cancellation how fast I receive my funds)

Bad Experience

• Same old boring interface with lot of Jing bang, foolish ads, false promotional activities, which really distracts attention.
• Booking page after you key in dates and place, is not that pleasing, and a bit confusing, cleartrip beats them in this. Too many repetitive links and not that clear on where to click.
• Too much of Colors painted, though only blue combination has been used, but because of this the visibility goes off, thats the reason creats confusion.
• Should get away with 800 x 600 resolution and make it compatible for 1024 resolution as almost every person nowadays work on 1024 or more resolution, due to 800 x 600 resolution, page looks very compressed so data cannot be readable properly

Yatra.com, TravelGuru.com and Ezeego1

Again these sites are not that bad but lacks basic needs of customers, their websites many a times are on maintainance or server down problems, call centers are always busy, so these two are a big NO, if you consider cleartrip and MakeMyTrip.

So things are very much improving in travel sectors, many of these sites have also stared to give train schedules, which is very good. So finally it seems that these travel guys have learnt the theory of user centric approach to their process, IT people have to learn from them, especially from ClearTrip.com

Also now we have website which is for booking of VOLVO busses, thats great naa... its http://www.redbus.in/, Its good but try only if you are 100% sure of travel..

Is you application USABLE?

How do you state that the application is usable or not? Or do we really give it a thought anytime… some questions to ourselves,

• Is the application user centric, I mean does he have the freedom to customize?
• Is the main navigation placed appropriately and not scattered in all pages?
• How many clicks do the user has to do to complete his/her task, if more then can it be reduced?
• Is each element in the page properly grouped to be easily recognizable and not repetitive?
• Are your forms too huge and many fields repetitive?
• Is the application taking hell of a loading time to load, if yes why?
• Is your application totally CSS controlled? This maybe one of the answers to tackle above point
• Are images placed in the application explanatory or some really needed?
• Is the application smart enough to understand and answer user’s query?
• Are error message appropriately given and not demanding?
  

These are some questions we need to ask our self to application. Some of them are very common but really helpful.

Many think “Daam…. But do we really need to do these things? We will do what the client wants and client demands. Who cares about usability and user centered approach…. These are all book written jargons, practically just a TRASH. Why in the hell we waste a resource on checking these things”.... sadly in India many of them have the same thoughts