When is the last time you ever sent a feedback/suggestion to a portal? The only portal that responds to my queries/suggestions is Google. It is very commendable on their part to respond to feedback emails. Google clearly says “We will get back to you in one business day” (kudos). On Yahoo after taking pains on giving a detailed feedback I get to see “due to the volume of emails we get, we may be unable to respond to your email. We do appreciate your feedback” (or something similar)
I personally have given importance to feedback emails since the inception of mahesh.com (early 1990s). My entire friends circle (other than from school) is from mahesh.com feedback mailbox 🙂
Let me get to the point of this post – I did try to give some suggestions to few travel portals in India but I think all feedback emails go to /dev/null 🙁
These days credit cards offer deals if you buy an airline ticket of a “particular airline”. I recall seeing a deal from Visa very often on cleartrip.com – 20% discount if you fly with Sahara (or was it Indian?). But there is a small problem. I get to see that advertisement when I perform the search after filling the form on the main page. Too late. Visa had a similar offer on makemytrip.com also. Why can’t they incorporate the payment method in the search form (optional) and their backend can search for deals which credit cards have to offer.
To elaborate, currently I select Mumbai-Bangalore sector for a particular date. When I click on “Search” I get to see a banner “Save by flying on Sahara if you pay by Visa”. Now it is not clear to me if the Sahara-Visa combo would have been cheaper than the results shown on the results page for my initial request. Simple solution, allow me to specify the payment methods I am willing to use (Visa, Mastercard, Amex – checkboxes, not dropdown or radio box please). Do all the jazzy stuff you want to do in the backend and show me the results. If a particular airfare applies to a credit card, display that credit logo beside that deal, that way the user will know that I HAVE to use that particular credit card and airline to get that deal.
I thought only by writing on the blog some travel portal may read my suggestion as feedback emails don’t seem to be important 🙁
it also depends on the way a microsite is being managed. for ex, on travelguru, you get to see all the fares for all airlines with the specific offer mentioned. this way, u can measure the discount rate, comapre and then committ.
non-lcc airlines will allways hv gud deals on the travel portals where distribution cost is least and it makes sense to avail of them rather than waiting to get the best deal out of deccan !