I am a frequent traveller in India – sounds very exciting,
but the reality can be a bit underwhelming.
With the burgeoning Indian economy and the multitude of travel options,
it is indeed a lot more convenient to travel than a decade ago. But travel today, especially on work, is just
a day in the office (outside the office!).
Over the years, frequent travellers have figured out to make
the entire travel process easier, more efficient and maybe a bit relaxing as
well. Everything from figuring out
booking the cheapest flights to the best hotels on budget to getting around new
cities. And most importantly, how to get a few hours of stress free relaxation
at the now crowded and bustling Indian airports.
Here are some tips for the weary Indian Traveler!
The Booking: The
What, the How and the Where
There are a multitude of travel sites and applications to
make your life simpler. Some that I have
frequently used include www.cleartrip.com,
www.goibibo.com, www.makemytrip.com, www.easemytrip.com, www.musafir.com Then there are a bunch of hotel specific
sites in addition to the ones above such as www.via.com,
www.trivago.com, www.tripadvisor.com etc All of these sites have their own mobile
applications as well for both apple and android phones.
The problem with most of the sites is that there is almost
too much information. These sites are
supposed to be travel consolidators to make your life easy – but which one
should we go to and for what? Also,
these guys are smart – they all offer promotions for various items at different
times – so the traveller has no good way to know when they are getting a deal
better than at other sites.
What I usually do is to simply google something like best
coupons for flights – immediately our trustworthy Google will enumerate all
most coupons related to these sites on the first page. Easy to click through and complete the
booking on these sites and save hundreds and in some cases thousands of rupees.
Many of these sites have figured out that people who
download their mobile apps will definitely be more loyal to them. Very true in most cases – I have downloaded a
Goibibo app, a Makemytrip app on my mobile.
The offers are sometimes better on the mobile apps versus their website.
The second big differentiator is the ease of use – how quickly
can you make your booking. www.goibibo.com stores my credit card or form
of payment in their profile, so do many of the other sites. Also, they all offer some kind of an ewallet
where you can get cash back for various bookings. The catch is that you can only use a small
amount of the cashback for each future booking.
There are some new promotions coming in through PayTM and
other wallet companies – very good to take a look at these for great
promotions. Just last month, I saved Rs
1000 per flight while booking on PayTM.
The money ofcourse goes into your wallet, but easy enough for me to
spend since I have tied PayTM as the backend payment for many things such as
phone recharges and Uber cars.
This info should be a great way to get started on great
savings….watch out for part 2 of my the tips and tricks of frequent travel….
