Irctc has started supporting booking airtickets online. That maked business sense considering that the volume of transactions happen every month (over 70 lakh). But for not so frequent flyers, I wanted to see how much value add it provides.
I wanted to try out Irctc first. Now the test data is as follows:
Journey Details: Hyderabad to Coimbatore and return (both on Spicejet)
Dates: Onward 26th June (8:55 am) and return 15th July 2010 (10:45am)
IRCTC: As soon as I clicked on find flights, after a few seconds the message comes up. “The connection was terminated by remote server. Blah blah blah…”. April 2010 data shows that 77% of transactions were a success at IRCTC. That means 23% of transactions were failed. For 70lakh transactions, thats quite a big number. Before giving up I tried searching once more and this time I was able to select the flights. The total fare came down to Rs. 4346.28.
Cleartrip: I find cleartrip quite neat, clean and user friendly. The total fare came to Rs. 4277
Spicejet: Finally I went to the airline’s online booking system itself, chose the flights and they gave me a discount for flying return on their airline. The total came to Rs.4005.
Verdict: Personally I would never book flight tickets on Irctc given their failure rate. Also I dont find the user experience appelaing compared to other sites. Sites like Cleartrip/Makemytrip etc are good enough, but if I am booking tickets on my own, I would rather go to the airline site itself to book ticket at a discounted rate. Airlines like Kingfisher has a frequent flyer programme whcih I would like to take advantage of. Irctc would work because agents would prefer it as a booking medium since they alreay book train tickets there. Given that many of us fly on business trip and the tickets are booked by company though agents, Irctc would start reaping profit even if they are not upto the mark. Also as an introductory offer, they are giving flat 10% off on flight tickets. Which means, the ticket price in our scenario would come to Rs.3946.28. If you ask me, I would still stick to Spicjet rate of Rs.4005.
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