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Rediff Follows Cleartrip Footsteps Launches Train Search - An Outcome Of Air Ticket Hike?
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Recently the airlines hiked their fares and canceled commissions given the high oil prices. According to ET The aviation industry would be suffering a Rs.80-billion ($1.86-billion) loss because of the recent fuel price hike and inflation.
Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines and Air India have decided to scrap the 5% commissions for travel agents from Oct 1. This will affect over 4,000 travel agents across the country whose annual turnover is nearly Rs.360 billion ($8.38 billion). And ofcourse the move will affect the heavily funded travel portals as well and even the travel aggregators who earn on every ticket sale.
So its no surprise that Rediff which had earlier launched faresearch product which looked at air ticket search has launched a product call train fare search. This is identical to the train search launched by cleartrip a few months ago so no innovation there. We had even questioned Hrush Bhatt Founder of Cleartrip about the trainsearch product on WATShow.com as well.
The difference might be the fact that Rediff Trains fare search gives the users options to book the tickets either through IRCTC site or through travel agents whose details are also available on the system which is currently not provided by cleartrip.
On the whole its will be interesting to see what repurcussions air ticket hike has on the Travel players and aggregators. The latest acquisition of travelguru which was focussed more on hotels rather than air tickets might be a case in point of safer business models. Continued rise in air ticket prices due to fuel could hit one and all in the market so its no surprise even rediff is launching services like train fare search.
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Yatra copied Cleartrip’s calendar and Now Rediff copies their Train search… Way 2 go Cleartrip
And I think Hrush is the best in the Travel Industry in India. his work is beyond perfection.
We love you
Hi Rajiv
This train search feature is available since quite some time.. infact long before the oil price bubble. You may like to reconsider your deduction.
Sameer is right…
Its there since long time…Not a gr8 finding dude…
It’s a big mistake. Rediff Train Fare Search launched way before cleartrip did. The headlines should have been the other way round “ClearTrip follows Rediff’s train fare search”. Don’t know why Rediff doesn’t popularizes it’s services but their travel search is much better than most others
Thanks for correcting me. This post is via a release sent officially by rediff. Frankly I had no clue they had launched this earlier and seems like they have announced it now itself. Nonetheless the impact of oil and air tickets forcing web players to look at other travel avenues stays.
Wake up guys.
I have been using rediff’s train search for a few months now. Just because you dont know about it does not mean it does not exist. I wonder why rediff did not or even now does not advertise this service. They are just not media savvy like other guys are.
Oil impact on planes tickets was this holiday season. I used it to do my booking around christmas.
Please get facts right.
Thats the second time in recent weeks Rajiv, i guess from now on you won’t forget to check out the website before heaading staright to your blog when you read the next press release..
@vaneet - I guess shortage of time due to wearing too many hats (entrepreneur + blogger + consultant) lead to taking short cuts.. Will Make sure that next time im more of a blogger when im blogging.. No excuses there.. Time to pull up my socks! Thanks all for the wake up call
Nothing against you Rajiv, but the last couple of weeks have seen a few rumours float out on the online media with zero fact checking.
In the balancing act between speed & accuracy, the tendency seems to be a big bias towards speed. In the end lowers credibility in the medium.
We have got to get out of this incessant scoop culture, and ‘breaking news’ urgency. Its only news if its real!
I completely agree Ram and we have learnt quickly. Do check out -> http://www.watblog.com/2008/07/07/helionvc-denies-funding-smsgupshup-while-smsgupshup-is-silent-on-the-issue/ Where we stayed away from reporting speculative news and instead checked facts..
Hrush still rocks…. wat say….???