We have launched the flight fare calendar/outlook yesterday.

This feature was there in our pipeline since long time, and demanded by quite a few users. Earlier, we used to show the flight routes for a default assumed date when the user did not specified the date, which was causing some confusion to our users.

Also from a user-interface point of view it is much more intuitive to  show a big calendar which contains either available-fare, or a link to check fare, when the date is not specified.

So, for flight searches, If you do not specify the date then we will show you the fare calendar. If you specify the date, then we simply show the flight details for that particular date.

More details on Calendar:

We show the calendar for 5 weeks starting from ‘today’. You can click on “Next Week” and “Prev Week” links to see the fares for other weeks. From this calendar you can easily find out the lowest fare in that 5 week period. We show “Check Now” link when there is no data for a cell. By clicking on that link, the flight routes for that particular date is displayed.

For example when you search for “Mumbai to Delhi flights” we will show the fare calendar, which looks as shown below. Since these two are popular airports, you will see that most of the calendar cells are filled up (with the help of searches made by other users earlier).

Mumbai to Delhi flight fare calendar

Another example is “Bangalore to Jammu flights“. In this case the calendar looks a bit sparse — not many searches done for this route perhaps. So, it can be used as date select calendar. Click on any cell, and you will see the flight routes for that particular date.

Bangalore to Jammu flight fare calendar

We think that this feature will be useful for you. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

First up the Greeting:

To you dear users, who took part in our survey: A big ‘Thank You!’. Now please go ahead and look up the survey results, Ye enlightened ones!

The rest of dear users/readers: We ran a survey on our site to find out, where people book their train and flight tickets, after they have searched their train and flight here on 90di site. We got around 1000 responses and below are the results.

For flight booking, figure 1 shows the results below.

Figure 1: 90di flight booking survey results

Not surprisingly the Airline sites are the most popular place for travelers who book their tickets online, with a lion’s share of 54%. This is followed by OTAs then Travel Agents. Flight booking through other sources meant – booking through their corporates or booking via Airline counter. Big surprise was that a significant 17% of people, book their tickets through travel agents (after searching online).

Some inferences from the flight booking survey data:

1) Perhaps the survey reflects the dynamic nature of Air-ticket pricing. As people want to get the best-deal, from whichever option they can get, they go to multiple sources. Hence Travel Agents score surprisingly high, quite close to OTAs (23%)

2) People are using OTAs too for search, primarily. To be honest, Travel search is still establishing itself in India, and perhaps there is an issue of trust (in terms of whether it really is comprehensive and the cheapest). So people do end up searching an OTA site along with a travel search player like us.

3) But one thing is clear, that given a choice, people would eliminate the middlemen and go directly to the source and book i.e. the Airline in this case. Makes for very good common sense too.

Over all: It does make a very good business case for travel search players like us. When most of the people like to book with Airline site directly. And of course everybody would want to compare their options, hence the need for travel search.

Now lets look at the train booking survey results (Figure 2 below):

Figure 2: 90di survey train booking graph

IRCTC website had a whopping 82% of market share in online bookings. Leaving quite little for Travel Agents and OTAs, with 8% and 5% respectively.

Key Inference based on train booking survey data:

Static pricing of Indian Railways, shuts the door on all the other players. And there is not much scope of adding value to the traveler, atleast as far as pricing is concerned. Means that once the traveler checks the availability and the price (which is also kind of known beforehand), it makes sense for the traveler, to book their tickets with IRCTC, thereby even saving on some service charge, with OTAs or travel agents might apply.

Would love to hear, if you are able to make any useful inferences, from this data we have. As for the proof that we actually did the survey, and not made this numbers up, here is a screen shot of the survey page.

The number of web sites in the world is already around 250 million and growing very fast. Also almost every body who sells something wants to have a web front end too. In this scenario of e-commerce website explosion, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a user to find the relevant information based on her needs. Below are some questions for which we will seek the answers:

• How does an Internet user know which site to use to pull out the information?

• Will the user get the best price and the best fit for her needs, just by searching the few sites she knows?

• How does the user know which sellers (sites) have what she needs?

• Also if she wants to compare the price (or other attributes of the product) from multiple vendors (web sites) how does she do?

• Won’t she be overwhelmed with data after just accessing a handful of seller web sites?

Read the white paper on Vertical Search to know the answers to the above questions.

We wrote this white paper a while back and sent it to some people, with the intent of introducing them to vertical search concepts and hoping to cause a change in how people think about their websites and data on the Internet.

Now trying to reach out to a wider audience, with the same intent. So please do read it and feel free to circulate it to anybody.

Key messages are:

1) Vertical Search is the future way of how people access any information on any domain, including travel.

2) Railways organizations like CRIS/IRCTC can really help catalyze the growth of innovative travel applications by making all their data public. There is already a precedence in the form of dataSF.org  (this guardian article covers the benefits that the city of San Francisco is already reaping by putting their data out in the open)

The link to the white paper, again, is here. Also you are invited to discuss it freely by putting your thoughts/comments on this blog Or in the twitter sphere or anywhere you chose.

Our users have been telling us to include the Tatkal availability details for Trains at 90di.com. Yesterday we released this feature.

Now you can get the availability details for both General and Tatkal quota for trains. We have kept the UI simple, just select the appropriate  radio button in the availability column.

Example: Bangalore to Mumbai by train tomorrow

See the below screen shots for more details.

Availability details for Train 1014

Tatkal availability details for train 1014

Please  try out this at 90di.com and give your feedback on this.

Heard that @Infosys recently closed a deal on Twitter? @90di got a review and interview done.  Thanks to twitter.

Arkid Mitra from microreviews.org contacted 90di.com on twitter for an interview as part of their new series “start-up reviews and interviews”.  The interview was conducted on the same day. The very next day they published it. You can read the full article on microreviews.org.

They have done a wonderful job by doing a comprehensive review of 90di.com. There have pointed out some of the shortcomings of 90di. We need these kind of reviews and feedback. We will address these points.

But couple of things we wanted to clarify:

• Mumbai to Nazira: Yes we do not show routes from Mumbai to Nazira. But we do ‘Near Search’ for this. Nazira doesn’t have Train or Flight connectivity. So we give options where users can choose a ‘big place’ near to Nazira. This list includes Dibrugarh. So if user chooses Dibrugarh, we show routes from Mumbai to Dibrugarh.
• Mumbai to Jammu via Lucknow: 90di understands this query as the user wants routes between Mumbai and Jammu which passes through Lucknow. Since there are direct Train/Flights available between Mumbai and Jammu, we show the direct routes first. We also show the routes which have transit at Lucknow. But we agree that  in order to not confuse the user, we can remove the direct routes (being extra nice can confuse the user just give him what he wants)

Thanks again to Arkid and microreviews.org folks for doing an effort review. All the best for your site folks!

Greetings,

Its been fair amount of time since the last post, as we have been busy implementing stuff. And now its time to announce one such feature, which has been out there silently for past few weeks – Its called ‘Near Search’.

Let me explain how it works.

Often you want to travel to destinations which do not have a railway station or an airport, but have very good road connectivity from nearby big places. To give two examples:

Delhi to Munnar

Mumbai to Kasauli

Like this there are thousands and thousands of small (and/or tourist) places like -  Panchgani, Mahabaleshwar, Puri, Konark, Kedarnath, to name just a few, to which we now will be able to show connectivity and provide help in reaching there.

Behind the scenes the 90di search engine, works hard to find all the better connected places nearby and prompts a list of such places to the traveler.

Figure 1: Near search screen shot

Figure above shows a sample screen-shot of the search Bangalore to Panchgani .

In this case the user can chose the best route (train/flight/bus/and their combination) in two steps.

In the 1st step traveler can chose the best place near to Panchgani, default we give is Satara, also Pune (another nearby big place) is in the list.

In the 2nd Step user can do a route search to the place chosen.

So please do give it a try and let us know what you think. We can’t have enough of your encouragement and improvement feedback.

And if you find a small/tourist place in India not there, just tell us (Give feedback or just comment on this blog) and we promise to add it real-quick!!

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.

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

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.