Taragana have started a series of interviews with prominent entrepreneurs from India and all over the world.

Last week they interviewed Khushnood, our co-founder.

You can see the full interview here.

If you are checking for train availability on 90di.com, you will now get the availability details for 6 days in one single click. Once you click “get availability” link, we will show the availability for that particular date and a link for remaining 5 days availability.

Thanks for the feedback. They really help us to improve.

The following screen shots explain this feature.

before clicking the availability link

availability details - shows link to next 5 days availability

next 5 days availability details

We have launched mail based search feature on 90di, wherin you can send your travel search queries in subject field of email to the emailID 90di.com@gmail.com and you will get your search result in your inbox within minutes.

Search query should be normal free text based search query. For example if you want to find flight fares between Mumbai and Delhi on next Friday, you can send an email with suject Mumbai to Delhi by flight next friday and you will get the results in your inbox.

Along with the booking link tele booking numbers of all the airlines are provided so that you can call the airines directly and book your ticket.

For train availability, just start your query with keyword “AVL” and provide all the required information. For example for availability for train number 1014 between Bangalore and Mumbai your query should be AVL train 1014 SBC to LTT on 07/Jul/2009 2A

Try it out and let us know your thoughts!

In our ongoing effort to improve the user experience, we have changed the look and feel of our home page. We have made it more simplified.

The logo and the search box are now placed at the page center. The menus are moved to the top of the page. What’s new and Buzz sections now come at the page bottom. We have tried to make the home page less cluttered.

See the following thumbnail images (click on the image to see it in full size) to understand the changes we have done.

Please give your feedback on this.

We are continuously trying to improve our search results along with other enhancements. In this effort, we are now showing the connecting flights from the same service provider which you can book in one single click.

For example if you search for “Goa to Kolkata flights on sunday“,  you will see the connecting flights which you can book in one single click.

Fig: Connecting flights with single booking

We had announced bus search some time back.

Now 90di.com have partnered with Travelyaari (Mantis) to enhance its existing bus  search services. Mantis has a unique approach to bus reservation in which they are building a first of its kind GDS like system for buses. Read more about Mantis here.

Also we are glad to announce that with this partnership, we are able to cover around 150 more places in India.

Travelers will now have more choices to choose from when booking the bus tickets through 90di.com.

For example now the you see bus routes between AJMER and AHMEDABAD which were not there before this partnership.

So go ahead and try it out. Give feedback to us, we never can have enough of it.

And remember to tell your family and friends too to use our service for searching for their bus travel too.

Our free text search bar now supports round trip search requests too and you don’t have to search twice for your round trip journey. Instead you can now search something like

Bangalore to Mumbai tomorrow morning and return on tomorrow night ,

and you will get both onward and return routes.  Or you can search something like

Delhi to kolkata by flight on friday and back on monday morning.

If you have observed my examples closely you must have noticed that free text search bar now  supports time range along with date too.  So you can have any of these time range in your search queries: morning, evening, tonight, noon, night,  afternoon etc.

So go ahead and try it out.

People have been demanding the feature of being able to specify the travel class in their free text search queries. As Rockey had put in a comment earlier.

I am pleased to announce, that its now out there. Some examples of specifying the travel class:

Lucknow to Delhi AC Train
Kolkata to aligarh by sleeper class next tuesday
Jammu to agra by 3 AC on saturday
hyderabad to Jaipur by 2 AC train

Its quite tolerant in terms of how you specify class. For example train class 3A can be specified as 3rd AC, AC, or as 3A.

All the train classes are supported:
- SL (Sleeper)
- 2A (AC 2 tier)
- 1A (AC First class)
- FC (Non AC First Class)
- CC (Chair Car)
- 2S (non-AC seating)

(point to note here is that if a class is not supported by a train we still show that train and try to show a class which is close enough. For e.g. if somebody wants 2A and its not there then we may show a 3A class as default if 3A is there in the train)

The flight classes supported are Economy and Business.

Classes supported in a Bus are Seater, Sleeper, but  the search end its not implemented.  Meaning even if you specify a class for bus travel, it will ignore it, as of now. But on our results page we do show you the supported classes by the Bus Operator.

Try it out! Feedback very welcome.

Bored looking at the same existing ui?

Here is a new and fresh look and feel for our search results page.

We have tried to show the results in more user friendly manner.

We have avoided the repetitions (The departure and arrival times used to repeat). In routes which involve at least one change-over, we are now showing the wait time at the transit station.

Along with this we have made some changes to how we get the routes. We now fetch the routes on demand. If you search from Bangalore to Mumbai, initially we show you the train routes. We get the flight routes only if you are interested in it, i.e, if you click on Flights tab. This applies to Bus and Train+Flight routes also. With this we have avoided loading your browser with routes which you don’t want.

Try it out and tell us what you feel about our new UI.

Please see the below images to understand the changes. The images on the left hand side are of the old UI and those on the right hand side are of the new UI.

Flight view in old version

Flight view in new version

Train view in old version

Train view in new version

Bus view in old version

Bus view in new version

Train+Flight view in old version

Train+Flight view in new version

We have launched the BUS search today

With this we are now covering around 6000 places in India. Many remote/small places are also included now.

You can also book these buses online.

Please try it out and give your comments.

Some examples:

1. Bijapur to Bangalore Bus tomorrow

2. Bhuj to Jamnagar Bus

3. Bangalore to Byndoor Bus next Friday

Thanks to our partner, TicketVala.