I always thought that searching for a house is one of the toughest activities to undertake but now I am not sure about it. Something which gives a close competition to house-hunting process is…online airline ticket booking.
The reason for this is that virtually every day we have new travel portals coming up and offering some wonderful discounts. Add to that the older players like www.makemytrip.com or www.cleartrip.com or www.yatra.com. They also offer great packages on airline booking. The issue complicates when they also offer discounts. Now, even with the discounts are on some airlines when booking is done with some particular credit card on some routes and other trillions of conditions applied.
Furthermore, all airlines have their individual website which also give out offers. For example, SpiceJet offers discount on return booking, just like international carriers. Indian Airlines also gives a flat 10% discount if a ticket is booked 30 days in advance. (These offers were on when I am writing this :D) And for reasons unknown to me, GoAir does not figure in any of the travel portal searches. Since, they don’t fly to Calcutta, which they might now given that they are flying to Guhawati and Bagdogra now, I don’t really need to check their offerings. Else, I need to check their site as my experience has been really good with them in the past.
So, when I had to plan my travel from Kolkata for some places, I had to take the plunge in the vast ocean of websites. I started with travel portals and checked out the timings of available flights. Moved to individual websites of the airlines to compare fares and they were much lesser as opposed what was being offered by portals. I chose to compare fares being offered by some of not so popular portals like www.ezeego1.co.in and www.travelocity.co.in and much to my amazement, the latter one was offering tickets less than what airlines themselves were offering! I chose the last one for my booking finally and I am quite sure of getting the best deal possible on the day of booking for my travel dates.
Moreover, in the end I would strongly recommend that please do check airlines websites as for some strange reason some of the flights are not shown in the search results of the travel portals. For example, there is a 1450 flight from Calcutta to Delhi (which suited me best and finally booked this) which was not coming in the search result of some but I got to know about it from the JetLite website. Also, please do see the breakup of the fare being offered by any website. Some of them charge for insurance, which is not needed and also charge if one blocks seat at the time of booking!
No doubt going online has eased the process of booking airline tickets, it also calls for a lot of prudence and site-searching.
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