Cleartrip which had earlier included railway train search and then booking availability on its travel portal seems to have strengthen the ties further with IRCTC. Cleartrip has announced that it has become the exclusive partner to IRCTC’s website railtourismindia.com to power hotel search and booking on the same.

Cleartrip had been more in the news lately for its corporate travel planning product and its extension into rail search and bookings. Hotels have always been a low key product at Cleartrip. Travelguru a player which started as full services OTA has been a front runner now when it comes to hotel booking infact so much so that they have completely outsourced their flight bookings to iXiGo.

Ideally Travelguru given its laser sharp focus on hotels one would have thought that they would be an ideal partner and it makes a lot of sense for them as well because IRCTC does have tremendous traction on its sites. Nevertheless Travelguru’s loss is Cleartrip’s gain which seems to have used its API first time on a third party site. I wont be surprised if we see travel booking widgets being rolled out by travel players which can be embedded by anyone anywhere for bookings. After all distribution via many platforms is only going to increase the no of bookings for these platforms.

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