The Hindu : Front Page : “Shubh yatra!” Travel tools for rest of us

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Sunday, Oct 28, 2007
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“Shubh yatra!” Travel tools for rest of us

Anand Parthasarathy

‘Ninety Degree’ helps combine train and air travel

DOWN-TO-EARTH TRAVEL: New Web resources target train and bus journeys.

Bangalore: The explosion in the private airline business and the emergence of many budget carriers has opened India’s skies to thousands of its citizens.

But there are lakhs for whom this is still unaffordable — or who can think of an air trip only when combined with a journey by a cheaper mode. So far they have been denied the advantages of an Internet -based service.

Now three engineers in Bangalore, have come together to close this gap: Khushnood Naqvi, Kiran M.S., and Abhinit Kumar, all formerly employed at Infosys, recently launched a company, Ninety Degree Internet Software. Their flagship offering is an India-specific travel search engine — www.90di.com — which aggregates information from Indian Railways as well as all airlines in India. Most usefully , it allows travellers to create an itinerary based exclusively on train or air — or a combination of the two. The data base covers over 4000 Indian places — and the strength of the search facility lies in its ability to suggest all possible ways to get from here to there. Users can view various option, even call up a map to trace the rout. They can then ‘mix and match’ rail and air links and work out a combination that fits their purse.

In many respects the rail search facility is an improvement over anything offered by the Railways themselves and a few trials searches by this correspondent threw up many alternatives that would have been difficult to track down by reading the time tables. The site is also very useful if air services connect only part of the proposed trip: For example it will suggest the fastest connection from Delhi to Kottayam: by air to Kochi and then the best rail connection from there.

Mr. Naqvi, Ninety Degree’s Director, told The Hindu that the web resource does not do the booking — it lets the user finalise the itinerary and then provides links to the online booking facilities of the individual airlines. For train bookings the link leads to the IRCTC page which is India’s busiest e-commerce site. 90DI is a starkly simple-looking but feature-rich resource that will ease the hassles of travel planning for many of us.

Online bus ticketing

Also launched last week was what is claimed to be India’s first online bus ticketing service. The brainchild of a management veteran, Haranath Lokanadham, Ticketvala ( www.ticketvala.com) is an end to end service that allows users to search for various private long distance bus options between cities, make the booking online, pay by credit card and obtain an e-ticket.

The option of towns listed, is limited to around a dozen in Maharashtra and Gujarat — but the company is working to expand the service to progressively cover the rest of the country. Meanwhile there is a helpline telephone for destinations not currently listed — a compelling travel resource for Indians, albeit a work in progress.

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