Penned Thoughts

Due to the large number of train and flight tickets I have to book on a regular basis, I’ve had the opportunity to try out a fair number of travel booking sites in India. Here are the reviews of the ones I’ve used so far, in reverse alphabetical order.

Yatra: It is one of the most popular travel booking websites in India and for good reason—it has a very well laid out user interface and they offer a lot of discount codes and special offers to their customers. They also have a stellar customer support team. It all comes at a price, however. Yatra charges a premium for using its service and its prices are almost always higher than those of competing travel booking sites. Not very much higher, mind you, but high enough for you to notice. They often used to have exclusive deals and significant discounts on prices in their early years but they are few and far between now. They also offer bookings of train tickets and, although it’s slightly more expensive than booking them directly through the IRCTC website, I prefer it over the latter, simply because it has a better user interface and the rate of failure is much lower.

Travelocity: When Travelocity launched the Indian version of its site, they started things off by offering Rs. 400 discounts on all tickets, which, given how low the prices for flight bookings have come down in recent years, can be a large percentage on most bookings. They don’t offer that discount on all tickets anymore but they still manage to almost always be cheaper than Yatra and other competing websites. The site’s interface is nothing to crow about but it isn’t too shabby either. I definitely would prefer it if they mentioned whether the tickets are refundable upon cancellation or not, like Yatra and most other sites do. They do not offer bookings of train tickets.

IRCTC: They only offer train ticket bookings, of course, and the site works well for the most part. Being a Government service, the prices are very low and they only thing the charge you is a paltry Rs. 20 convenience fee, which is more than reasonable. However, their servers are not nearly well-equipped enough to deal with the massive spikes of traffic they receive at 08:00 A.M. on a daily basis, when the Tatkal bookings open up for trains that are scheduled to ply two days later. The site cannot deal with the massive hits and goes down as soon as the clock strikes the eighth hour each morning. Besides that, and the dated look and user interface, it is a pretty well-executed utilitarian website that gets the job done.

iXiGO: iXiGO is fantastic! Well, it isn’t as fantastic as it used to be but it’s still pretty awesome. Instead of acting as a middleman like most agents and charging a commission for using its services, iXiGO brings you prices for tickets straight from the official websites of all the flights operating in India. When you choose your flight and hit Book, it directs you to the respective flight’s website and you pay them directly. These days, however, that does not offer you a guarantee of being the cheapest tickets on the block. Thanks to the emergence of sites like Travelocity, you can often get a discount if you deal with the agent instead of dealing with the flights themselves.

What’s more, where once iXiGO used to list the exact fare that you’d have to pay to get your tickets, the prices it lists these days are often a few hundred short of what the actual total ends up being when you land on the flights’ websites. That, you’d think, would defeat the whole purpose of iXiGO, but that’s not quite true, because iXiGO has a few tricks up its sleeve.

For one thing, it automatically opens Travelocity and other websites in a new window and brings you prices from there as well, so you are free to compare it against the flight’s own prices. For another, it has absolutely the best user interface among all the travel booking websites I’ve ever used in India, both for its flight and railway booking services. It even remembers the data you’d entered the last time you visited the website—a trick other websites would do well to ape—so that you don’t have to keep entering it again and again every time you visit. Nice touch!

What’s more, the creator of iXiGO maintains a very active Twitter account where he actively encourages users to send feedback and post about any issues they might have, which he then promptly resolves to the best of his ability. They also quickly respond to e-mails they receive. I know this is starting to sound more and more like an advertisement but trust me when I say this, I have not been paid by them to write this article. I’m a genuine fan.

Goibibo: Since its the newest kid on the block, it’s generally also the cheapest. Much like Travelocity before it, Goibibo offers significant discounts on the prices of most tickets you book through it, making it pretty cheap indeed, at least until you actually try to pay for those tickets. In a stunning show of lack of foresight and sheer incompetence, it rejects nearly every payment method you throw at it, including debit cards from Axis Bank, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank’s netbanking (and those are the three best banks in India). It pretty much only accepts credit cards and even those after a few failed tries. If your cards or your bank’s netbanking is supported and you’re willing to be spurned a few times in order to score the discount, Goibibo is ideal for you.

Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip and the rest: They’re all the same. I’m sure they’re good in their own right and I hope they have some interesting new features to offer but in the few times I’ve given them a shot, I’ve found the prices to be about the same as Yatra’s and the user interface to be ordinary and boring. I’ll admit to not having used them nearly as often as I’ve used the others mentioned above, so I’m not in much of a position to comment on them. If they are any good, I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

So, what do I use?

I go to iXiGO and enter all my data in (unless I want to reuse the information I’d keyed in during my last visit, as is often the case—once again, ingenious!) and then uncheck akbartravelsonline and Goibibo from the “also check on” options below. I leave Travelocity checked, however, and hit return. In most cases, Travelocity offers the tickets at either the same price as the official one quoted by the flight or at a slight discount and I book from there. They have a very friendly and helpful customer service department and the site is not too shabby either (although it could definitely use some sprucing up). Like I mentioned before, however, I would like it if they could clearly mention whether the prices of the tickets I’m booking are refundable upon cancellation or not.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen! In a fiercely contested battle between Goibibo, iXiGO, Travelocity and Yatra here on Penned Thoughts, the lethal combination of iXiGO and Travelocity has won the day and laid claim to the crown. Let the travelling begin!

-Aayush