Cleartrip is on a roll. Today, the company has launched a trip planning tool by the name Waytogo, powered by Australia-based multi-modal search engine Rome2Rio.
Using Waytogo, users will be able to search for various route and mode of travel options. The product also displays layovers at transit, travel duration and distance, point to point pricing, links to more information for a particular route.
Cleartrip claims to have route options to 2.5 million destinations across the world, 5000 billion routes, 670+ airline schedule options, 600+ ground transport options. Various transport options are flight, car, bus, ferry, and train.
Below screen grab shows travel options for Bangalore to London.
Below screen grab shows travel options for Bangalore to Mumbai where Indian Railways travel option is displayed. The rates displayed are more or less accurate.
Most of Rome2Rio's (TLabs here) user interface is retained in Waytogo. But, quite a few customisations have happened.
For the environment conscious travellers, Waytogo has a "Green Travel" feature where travel options are sorted by their carbon footprint.
Upon selecting (clicking on Book) a particular travel option, user is directed to Cleartrip's flight/car/train/bus booking page.
Waytogo is still in Beta version. So, we can expect a lot more new feature to come in near future.
Overall - Waytogo is a travel planning wrapper product for underlying booking engines for various products (flight, hotel, etc).
Recently, Cleartrip spoke about how it redesigned (Project Tuxedo) its entire website over a period of one year. In April, the company rolled out an industry-first feature in which users can perform flight modifications entirely online.
In March, rome2rio announced a functionality that display point-to-point pricing. The recently refreshed Google Maps (that has multi-modal search option) was seen as a threat to rome2rio, but the company explained why its not the case.
Rome2Rio's API is becoming popular. Tnooz's THack Sydney winner Flight Center built an iPhone app by name NowWhat that works on top of APIs from Rome2Rio, Viator and TourWrist.
The app gives suggestions to users about what to do on a journey based on the weather (it’s raining – do something indoors, etc) and other variables.