Underlining its commitment to delivering innovative products to its customers, India’s leading travel and leisure platform Cleartrip has introduced ‘Shortlists’ on mobile and desktop to help users in their international flight booking research.
International travel planning is fairly time consuming and confusing, requiring customers to compare and choose between destinations, dates, airlines, specific flight itineraries, choice of connections, layovers and transit visas. Needless to say, this is an expensive affair for most travellers and hence calls for being even more diligent and careful while planning.
Travellers often start researching on travel portals 45-90 days in advance, and may search as high as 100 times before making a booking, and be sure that they get the most optimal fares within the parameters they are comfortable with.
Cleartrip’s latest feature, Shortlists, is built to help users compare multiple flight itineraries across different onward and return date combinations. On the search results page, users can simply swipe left on an itinerary to add to Shortlists. To check the latest fares on these Shortlisted itineraries, a user can simply visit the Shortlists from the home screen to see all the shortlisted itineraries and compare the latest fares. As an added convenience, Cleartrip automatically tracks individual itineraries and alerts users before the airline is about to increase the fares, giving ample time to make a buying decision. This helps in eliminating the pressure and fatigue of re-searching those itineraries, and helps in getting the job done with minimum effort.
The initial phase went live in public beta in October, 2018, and was visible to around 10 million customers for two months, while the phase two was launched in Q1 in 2019 for all Cleartrip customers. Also, this has been launched simultaneously in all the 8 markets that Cleartrip is present.
Speaking on the development, Subramanya Sharma, Chief Product Officer, Cleartrip, said, “Simplifying the travel experience is the main reason why Cleartrippers come to work every day. An average international leisure traveler today makes around 70-100 searches for a specific trip. The introduction of ‘Shortlists’ for flight bookings is a big step towards making international travel simple. This solves for the ‘search fatigue’ that most international leisure travelers face today. Post launch, we have seen that 1 among 6 users who visit itinerary step shortlist an itinerary and these users convert 2x times more than other users. We will continue to build tools that simplify travel planning and discovery for our customers.”