Metavibes

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

State-of-the-art Road Travel services?

Past few days, there has been a flutter in travel circles with Raj National Express announcing Rs. 99 fare from Pune to Mumbai - fine print being that it is only for limited time. In any case, the company is likely to kickstart the competition in the road travel sector - at least in Pune-Mumbai route.

The current services are pretty bad (confort-wise), even though the available schedules are good (every 15 min.). A popular private player provides very cramped space between the seats. This insensitive player also numbers all the seats so that "1" starts from somewhere middle, so if you select 15/16 as a good seat, it is actually one of the last ones. (Initial seats are named "A" to "N" or so.)

It was interesting to find an ad of Raj National in one of the channels (as running ticker bar) - probably first time for any travel player. The site was prominently displayed. Visiting the site made you believe that it is indeed of the standard of airline players (with online booking and all that). But unfortunately it took only a few clicks to realize that it is just a template and a static site (complete with a "Verisign" logo, which of course is just a image). The agency probably doesn't know the value of attention generated from the ad!

Let us all hope something good happens in this sector in coming days...


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