IXIGO = EASY GO!!

Probably that was the aim of Travenues, a travel 2.0 technology company, when they started working on their travel portal IXIGO and I think they have done a pretty good job there.

If you didn’t know about IXIGO, it’s a travel portal. How is it different from hordes of travel portals? Like some of the majors in the league like Yatra, MakeMyTrip and some of the lesser known like Indiatimes and Rediff (yeah they too!!). What is refreshingly different is
· They don’t book tickets for you so the initial cynicism of costlier tickets is gone. You have to book the tickets on sites which you choose to book from. They only display the results for you. They even claim themselves as infomediary and not intermediary.
· The search is extremely fast compared to MakyMyTrip, Cleartip and Yatra.
· They show prices including the tax amount, which means no hidden surprises and one stop shop for deciding which flight to choose
· They take all permutation and combinations for flight routes,flight carriers and then display the result. And to my wonder they search for lesser known routes as well. I mean I did a search for BLR-ALLAHABAD and I had 10 results. They were not in my budget though :(
· To top it, they allow you to customize “comfort features” like maximum no. of stops you want in your journey, filter results for combination of carriers or single carrier.
· They filter data from travel portals like Yatra and airline websites like Air Deccan as well so no running around to multiple websites and comparing fares. You can watch the flight details on the same page. So it indeed is one-stop-too-quick-a-shop for flight decisions.
· And they are constantly adding new features, from multiple airline combinations, direct checkout, book-marking results they have sprung forward to launch IXIGO search on mobile in collaboration with ONYOMO.

Infact, if you have heard about it on this blog only, they were chosen as one of the top six
startups in the internet space in India and invited to showcase their product at Proto.in,
India's premier product startup showcase event. Part 1 and Part 2. (There is no sound in
the presentation when I watched it)

Features I think they should include. I think they should include search for +/- 2 days as is in case of Yatra. When one goes to search for a flight, rarely one is fixed on the days one wants to travel, one just has a rough date in mind and cheaper fare so +/-2 days would really present one with options of quickly looking and deciding to utmost satisfaction that one has got the best deal.

But considering my strategy of looking for the cheapest fare on these sites and then booking on the site of the carrier, I think this portal replicates my strategy very well :D... and I really think its EASY GO!!

Check it out @ http://www.ixigo.com/ and let me know what do you think abt the portal and if you disagree with my review of it