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Cleartrip to increase inventory

Anupama Sushil - New Delhi

Stuart Crighton COO Cleartrip.com

Cleartrip.com will now concentrate on adding more domestic hotels across categories to its base in all major locations in India. It will also work closely with its hotel partners and assist them in optimising the inventory and making the right product available at the right price.

Stuart Crighton, its COO, said, "Cleartrip currently has 3,500 domestic hotels and over 70,000 international hotels. But looking at India's domestic requirement, our focus will now be to make the domestic hotel base much more comprehensive giving customers access to a larger selection of hotels within each hotel category for over 500 locations across India."

According to Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry Finance of India (ASSOCHAM) India will receive 10 million tourists including domestic and international by 2010. Keeping this in mind, Crighton said that while it will be comprehensive in its hotel product offering, it will ensure that all hotels that feature on Cleartrip are put through a quality check.

The positioning of the products will play a major role in the way it is being looked at along with sales. For this, Cleartrip will provide a search interface for hotels, allowing customers access to complete information about hotels. "Our next focus is to build the domestic hotels and packages product. This is a market where there is no dominant player and there is a huge amount of latent demand," he confidently added.

Like many of its competitors, Cleartrip does not offer complementary services like car rentals on its site because at this point such services account for small numbers online in terms of sales. However, Crighton clarifies that it will launch it when the market is ready to buy these products online. According to him, the hotel structure and the product are not standard across all hotels. While some room categories include complimentary hotel transfers from the airport/railway station, the others do not.

He added that strong growth has prompted Cleartrip to launch a series of innovative offers for hotels from time to time. These range from price propositions to value additions depending on the objective of each promotion that is jointly decided with the hotel partners. It is currently offering a round trip ticket on booking any Trident Hilton properties across India absolutely free.