Posts tagged cleartrip

Update (3 Feb 2012): Cleartrip has redesigned this feature. as of 3 Feb 2012. The blog post explaining the redesign is here. Thanks to readers everywhere (Twitter / Facebook / Y! News / Cleartrip blog) who let the discussion happen and contributed with their opinions. The discussion (regardless of the opinions shared) was the product feedback that made an impact. The original post, dated 26 Jan 2012, follows:

I am planning yet another trip. As usual, I opened Cleartrip (has been my favorite travel bookings portal; I prefer them because of their sleek interface), and searched for flights. I chanced upon what I now call the “Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm” - I think I’ve seen such fake scarcity tactics on other booking portals as well, but witnessed it in real-time action on Cleartrip now.

Here’s what I saw when I searched for 1 seat on the route on specific dates (for the record, these searches were done around 11.40 am IST on Thursday, 26 Jan 2012):

Did you notice the red “1 SEAT LEFT” sign in there?

Not being pedantic here, but most people will read that red-color sign as “LAST 1 SEAT LEFT”. (For the pedantically correct: Of course, there is 1 seat at least left, that’s why the portal is even showing me the flight in search results. Then this sign doesn’t make sense.)

I played with the search settings, and changed the number of passengers to 2.

Here’s what I saw:

Same flight. Nice. Now they have “2 SEATS LEFT”.

I was trying to grasp what I saw, and changed the search to 4 passengers.

Same flight. No surprises here. I saw this:

“4 SEATS LEFT”. Sigh.

What makes things worse, is that I then searched at MakeMyTrip (I’ve hated their cluttered interface always; but was forced to search with them now after seeing the Cleartrip algorithm). MakeMyTrip showed me a seat selection preview of the same flight, with a lot many more seats still available:

I have a different favorite travel bookings portal now. It’s a matter of who exhibits honest behavior from the onset. No harm done.

As someone in a public chat (credit: reo on freenode) said “The only power consumer really has … ‘Don’t buy it.’  ”