The Hindu : Front Page : Shubh yatra! Do it yourself

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Sunday, Nov 09, 2008
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Shubh yatra! Do it yourself

Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE: Indian air travellers are getting caught in a mini conflict between travel agents and airlines.

Almost all carriers operating in India have served notice that they will no longer pay agents a commission for booking tickets for their customers.

The agents, who account for the majority of tickets sold in India, have retaliated, announcing a scale of ‘service charges’ for future bookings made through them.

These could range from a few hundred rupees for domestic tickets to many thousands for international journey.

Budget-conscious travellers have a choice of excellent online portals as well as the web pages of individual airlines and hotels.

We review below just the latest offerings, some of which make the travellers’ work even easier: The world’s largest travel community, TripAdvisor, opened an India-specific site in September ( www.tripadvisor.in).

It presents so many reviews by real travellers whose unalloyed opinions might be a good indicator of the real pluses and minuses of hotels and trips.

It is useful to compare the prices offered by different flight and hotel offerings. CompareSasta ( www.comparesasta.com) concentrates on aggregating search and comparing different options for the budget traveller — including Internet services.

And for those having to spell out exactly what they want, Ninety Degree Internet Software has created a search engine where you can enter your needs in a natural way: “From Bangalore to Chennai by train on November 20. Then by air to Kolkata the next Sunday and return to Bangalore on December 1.” This works well especially when one has to combine different modes of travel ( www.90di.com).

Recently iXiGO( www.ixigo.com) has launched a revamped hotel search engine, claimed to be India’s biggest, covering 6400 properties 400 cities.

It has also partnered with HolidayIQ and OKTATAByeBye, two good Indian hotel review sites, so that users can read third party opinions before making bookings.

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