cleartrip.com - so usable you lose all your money

Quoting Cleartrip's about section, "Cleartrip is dedicated to making travel simple". So simple that you can easily buy tickets worth thousands of rupees. And then lose thousands of rupees by clicking the 'Cancel Booking' link by accident.
ClearTrip is so easy to use that it apparently doesn't believe in confirmation dialogues - your booking will simply be canceled (see the actual steps involved in cancellation on cleartrip here). Cool, what? The good Mr. Narla just lost Rs. 8000/- this way. That's what I call usabilty in action.

Update
Looks like cleartrip.com isn't bad at all once you get past the call centre. Narla contacted them via the feedback section of their website and this elicited a very quick response. They've been exceptionally helpful and have offered to refund Rs. 4000, half the cancellation charge due. This is pretty decent of them, keeping in mind the fact that cleartrip.com cannot recover the cost (it's already been canceled at the airline). Good stuff!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you please provide some additional details at:
http://www.cleartrip.com/forums

There is no cancel link available on our site that is capable of directly cancelling a booking.

If this happened to you, we'd appreciate your help by identifying what happened and fixing it.

Keshav Ram Narla said...

I now have an email response for my feedback and the post here.

More info at http://www.keshavnarla.com/2008/05/cleartrip-clearly-you-are-taken-for.html

TechnoPhil said...

Thinking on Usability, did you notice this subtle scrolling thing about this site?

Enter Data. Click on Search Flights. The result would appear in:
http://www.cleartrip.com/flights/results
The Scroll Down operation seems to be endless with the let side frame jittering and the main client area scrolling up in definitely!

Saurabh Nanda said...

Sidu, we've reworked our cancellation page. Take a look at http://www.cleartrip.com/forums/40/topics/1133 and let us know what you think.