More on Travel dot coms

The online ticket/travel/hotel booking market has no dearth of new players. The newest one is www.xplorz.com. Waiting in the wings are www.arzoo.com (due shortly), and www.cleartrip.com (though the announcement came as early as in Aug’ 05, it’s yet to go live).

Industry buzz is that www.travelocity.com is also a few months away from launching in India. And the king of all, www.expedia.com is yet to make any announcement. While most of these are full service travel operators, with an operational team, there are a few dot coms that offer only the search services, while the booking has to be done with the actual airlines or on those portals appear in the search results. Thus, we have www.mobissimo.in, which started their India operations, recently. A search for a ticket in Mobissimo will perhaps land you in www.makemytrip.com. Mobissimo claims to have one of the most advanced search engines. www.kayak.com is another player in this segment, though they have not yet launched the Indian operations. One can still search for a Mumbai – Hyderabad ticket in Kayak, book it on Indian, except that the payments will be in dollars.

Xplorz.com claims that they are the only one in India that offers P3, ie, Pick, Pay and Print. (A not-so-clever marketing gimmick, like the XD3 technology your washing powder uses to extract dirt or the Mx2 technology used in your toothpaste that fights germs!)

Arzoo can claim some lineage. Promoted by Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame and supported by some Silicon Valley techies, Arzoo is set to storm the market by offering the largest variety of packages – international and domestic.

Leisure and Lifestyle Information Services (promoters of www.Indiaresorsurvey.com ) is running www.iyatra.com (beta), for online booking of holidays in hotels and resorts in the country. It is quite possible that this portal will evolve into offering services on flight bookings as well.

Small Island, Big Trip

Srilankan tourism’s new by-line is ‘Small Island, Big Trip’. Not merely a marketing gimmick. Considering the rainforests with rich bio diversity, historical and heritage places and a long coast line, all in this small island, ‘Small Island, Big Trip’ is very apt.

Check out the website www.smallislandbigtrip.com to get what Srilanka has to offer.

Travel Fare Wars

travelguru.com is the latest entrant in online travel booking. But it is not the last. cleartrip.com is on its way. Sify has recently acquired a travel portal and Sify services are due to be launched in June. So, as consumers are we going to have it all? Not sure!

Most of these portals offer the lowest fare (*Conditions Apply). But the fact is that these portals cannot offer you rates lower than that offered by low-cost carriers like Air Deccan or GoAir.

A couple of days back, out of curiosity I compared the rates in travelguru and makemytrip, for Mumbai - Coimbatore for 30 May. travelguru offered Rs 3200+ as the best rate, while makemytrip offered Rs 3800 as the best rate. Then, I checked Air Deccan for the same date in the same sector. And the offer was Rs 1200.

Interestingly, both travelguru and makemytrip says that they book tickets for Air Deccan. But both did not list Air Deccan in their offer. I do not know what arrangement they have with Air Deccan. But the bottom line is that for domestic travel (without hotel bookings, etc), it is better to approach the low-cost carriers directly to get the best rates.