The blog area has been silent for a while. We had been working on a lot of behind the scenes stuff – on improving the quality of the 90di search engine.

And now, we have some good news to share on the front-end too. We just upgraded the UI to, what we think, is a much better layout. It tells upfront what all travel services we provide. For example, many people do not know yet, that we do have Buses, along with Trains and Flights.

Also it should be easier to navigate for people with different needs. For example people, who want to search using a form. But please do not worry, we have retained the default as “natural” (free-text) search, as that’s what you folks, mostly use, isn’t it?

Do let us know, if you like it. Particularly, requesting you to let us know, if we inadvertently, made any things more difficult, which were easier earlier.

Here is how, the old UI (home page) use to look (for comparisons sake):

Below is the new UI (in the red shade — which narrowly missed, cutting it in the final release):

You can try it out here.

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!

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.

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.