Cleartrip upgrades its mobile portal

MUMBAI, INDIA: For Cleartrip, the online travel booking portal, it’s just been two years since it made its presence on the mobile platform. Now it has made latest advancement to its mobile site — Cleartrip Mobile, matching almost all features that are available on company’s website.

Among those new advance features on the mobile site, Cleartrip now offers last minute hotel reservations to users as well as booking for international flights.

In India alone, Cleartrip has 800 hotels that are available on its Quickeys which include five star as well as unrated hotels in metro and semi-metro locations.

Quickeys, the new feature, allows customers to make last minute hotel room bookings, where they get to avail a flat 30 per cent discount off the best available rates.

Already, 40 low-cost international carriers across Europe, Asia/Middle East, US/Canada and Australia are available on Cleartrip Mobile and international tickets can be easily booked via mobile phones.

“In June 2010, Cleartrip launched a HTML-based mobile site with minimum features such as ‘checkout’ process targeted at business travelers. Later, the mobile site was optimized for smart and feature phones with the growth of mobile phones in India,” said Satyajeet Singh, Cleartrip’s Product Manager (Mobile).

“Subsequently added new products for train travel and as per RBI guidelines for mobile payments Cleartrip added 3D secure gateway for smartphones,” added Singh.

With the rise in smartphones compared to feature phones, Cleartrip has focused development more on smartphones with support for BlackBerry, Apple’s iOS, Microsoft’s Window and Andriod.

It uses automatic device detection to offer best user experience for mobile phones whether it be smartphone or a more basic phone.

“Almost all features and products are available on mobile site not just in India but also in international markets. The user experience (UX) is different on mobile compared to desktop however it takes double effort and time in creating mobile UX and testing apart from concept development and product lifecycle,” said Subramanya Sharma, Cleartrip’s senior vice president — Product Development.