Need for smarter online travel sites in India

I ended up writing this post in response to Vibhav’s post on Understanding the online travel opportunity: I

Serving the domestic market through online services would be a great challenge, but I do see a business opportunity here. Being a frequent traveler myself I face a lot of challenges and every time I had to deal with the travel agents, I wished there was a better option. It’s not just me a lot of people around me echoed similar thoughts.

Bus travel and booking systems, even though travel agents are spread across adequately, dealing with them is a frustrating. Some common problems faced include multiple booking for the same seat, issues in rescheduling or cancellations, different pricing models for the same route from the same service provider. Travel agents don’t always demonstrate credibility.

Railway booking systems are no better, compared to what it was a couple of years back having to stand in those never ending lines giving up all other work to book tickets now the situation is much better. But that’s not the point given the present situation I would not say that online bookings are any easy. People use these sites only because there are not many choices.

From Vihbav’s blog:

“For train reservations, the indian railways site has really made the process as easy as it gets. So for ala carte bus and train reservations, I doubt if there is much a new online service can bring beyond the current options.”

I have to disagree with this, Indian railways have a long way to go to make online user experience easy. It’s a pain to book tickets, it’s clutter and chaos online, they remind me of the offline crowded reservation counters. Too many ads, unrelated information, lack easy navigation, not intuitive at all.

Talking about the present airline sites, they are no different. I have tried almost all the airlines, I have booked my tickets online a number of times and can only say there are numerous small issues that were ignored, either they don’t understand how the web works or they are not bothered. There is a complete lack of efficiency, each site clearly demonstrates the lack of thought they demonstrate lack of expertise. These sites are built with geeks in mind.

Efficiency, simplicity will play a key role in defining the success of ecommerce and I am not very optimistic considering the airlines are struggling to achieve it offline.

As far as I am concerned, as a consumer I’m still waiting for a simple application that lets me:

Book tickets online at the best (cheapest) price available on a given day.

I am sure that’s not too much to expect, I have seen and used makemytrip.com and was disappointed coz they caused me more anxiety by not delivering the tickets on time, in fact I had to call up multiple times only to learn that I can pick up the tickets from the airline booking counter at the airport. Now that’s definitely not the kind of situation any one would want to be on the day of travel.
Travelguru.com looks very promising, similar to makemytrip.com yet more robust, if they can reduce the dependencies on delivering the tickets by courier ( 3days) and fix few interface/interaction issues then definitely they are on track. Arzoo has a long way to go, again the interface or the features are not user centric. I strongly believe there is an opportunity for business in Travel space in India given the present choices. A general trend seems to be lack of understanding in terms of user needs and most of the issues are caused for not being user centric.

What’s required is a no frills, user centric smart application, that’s intelligent enough to anticipate and provide users choices to help them make informed decisions and help them meet their goals with minimum effort.