Ticket booking blues

Before I get back to further updates on ‘The Shop’ conference, here’s couple of things I noticed while looking up flight tickets online…

On the SpiceJet website, I’m at the page where you enter the traveller information and payment details. What irritated me was, that they haven’t (clearly) specified the total cost of the ticket!!

The fare is split into: “1 Adult @ Rs.1,899″ and “Taxes/Fees – Rs.1,375″. I would expect a travel site like this to total the cost and mention (in a large size) what I finally ending up paying. Just made the whole experience of booking a ticket very unpleasant. Of course, I didn’t complete the booking (there were better fares on other websites anyways).

Moving on, I was looking up options on Cleartrip, by far, my most preferred Indian travel site. The list of cities displayed “Madras” instead of “Chennai”.

The history (for those not familiar) is that the Madras/Chennai state government decided to change the British name (“Madras”) and get back to a more local name..and “Chennai” was the chosen name, for whatever reason.

It’s probably been 8-10 years (or is it more?) since the official name change. But, folks like me who’ve grown up on the good ol’ British name, “Madras”, continue to refer to the city by that name. However, most businesses including websites have made the change several years ago. So, seeing the cleartrip website continue to use “Madras” was a bit of a surprise.

I guess it wouldn’t make much of a difference to local users, but for somebody who’s new to the country, who’s probably familiar with the new name, “Chennai”, it could be a bit of a pain to first look up Chennai and not find it…and then get to know that “Madras” is the option he/she’s got to select!