Where do you want to go this summer? The heart says Ibiza or Monte Carlo or Morocco, the purse says Ooty or Manali or Goa. We say no. Why subject yourself to the tortures of vacationing in tired tourist traps with hordes of others? There’s plenty for you off the beaten track—at prices you can well afford. But before we get to the where, let’s tackle this bogey of affordability.

You might not believe it, but your rupee stretches a far sight more than you think thanks to package holidays and time-shares. And if you trawl for deals, you’ll find some gems—we show you how to begin the process when we discuss the emergence of online travel portals. Shop around carefully and you will very likely get low fares, cheap hotel accommodation and more. Also, make sure you start the process early. It might already be too late to get those killer deals, but you might just get lucky.

Whether you decide on an adventure holiday, a wildlife safari, cruise down one of the mighty rivers, or living under canvas, there are plenty of good deals to be had. We’ve started you off with our lists of what’s available for how much in each of these categories. As you see, it’s getting easy to be an intelligent traveller, with domestic tourism packaged as competitively and attractively as international travel.

Excited? All set to log in and book your family the summer holiday of their dreams at a price that won’t give you nightmares? Our columnist Dipen Sheth injects a note of reality at this point, leaving you with the fact that tourism is a badly neglected industry and tourist infrastructure is pathetic at best. But things are slowly improving, and the country could soon attract even more tourists. Till then, enjoy what’s on offer. Happy holidays.

Click-start your travel

Over 25 travel portals are offering you never-before choices. We spoke to both users and experts, and researched 12 major websites to help you hunt for the best deals.

How long has it been since you booked a flight or train ticket? Actually went up to a ticket window and received a ticket in exchange for money? Can’t remember, can you? And if you’re of Akshay Dhamdhere’s generation, you might not even have that memory, because you’re so used to booking online. Dhamdhere, 26, recently booked a Eurail Tour without going near a travel agent. “Travel planning online is so convenient. Who has the time to sit through a travel agent’s banter when all the information is there for the taking just a few clicks away?” asks Dhamdhere.

Indian travel portals are coming up almost by the day, thanks to phenomenal demand. After all, who wouldn’t rather book an entire holiday package from the comfort of his home (or office) when the option is to hunt down a “good” travel agent, who won’t gyp you and who will still give you a half-way decent deal? Little wonder then that even a comparatively small portal like ezeego1.co.in claims about 7,000 bookings a day on an average, with the number going up to 10,000 on the day they launch an offer.

Sweta Das, Management student "I am a frequent traveller, notching up about 10 trips a year. And travel sites are a manna from heaven when it comes to making quick bookings. When you have all the options in front of you, why would you be on the phone with a travel agent? That’s so obsolete now."

Akshay Dhamdhere, Product manager "I have planned my Eurail tour this summer exclusively through online travel portals. That’s where I learnt of a smart strategy to stretch my travel budget—I have picked up life membership at the Indian Youth Hostel Association. For a onetime fee of just Rs 1,500, I will not only get discounted rates at youth hostels abroad but also preferential treatment in terms of room allotment."

Vinita Agarwal, Gynaecologist "My husband and sons regularly book their air tickets online. Being Net-savvy, I too tried to book us a holiday package on Yatra last year. But it was an impromptu decision and I couldn’t bag the deals. So I booked early for our Jaisalmer holiday last December. The hotels were exactly as described on the site. The options provided are amazing."

Convenience is obviously the top reason for going online. It’s not just the fact that these sites are open round-the-clock. It’s also because most of these sites have evolved into one-stop shops for all travel-related needs. So, whether it’s a flight ticket or hotel accommodation or a cab to take you to and from the airport, you can book them all at the same site. Even better, most of these portals allow you to compare fares and schedules across airlines and hotels, so you can choose the one that best fits your wallet (and calendar).

Advanced sorting features help you narrow down your choice to exactly what you need, ranging from specific airline search and locating your hotel by name to sorting flights by departure time and comparing up to three hotels on one screen.

Travel portals are now mutating to grab more eyeballs. Instead of just offering real-time travel bookings, some like Ixigo, Zoomtra and Trip Mela are specialising in doing your work for you—they seek out and feature the best deals available on other travel providers. Coming soon is travelspice.com, the first Indian loyalty driven travel portal. Any reservations done via Travel Spice will earn the customer “TravelSpice points”, which will translate into waivers on packages and flight or hotel bookings.

All of which is good, but the single most important selling point is that rates online are likely to be cheaper. That’s because they bypass all intermediaries and deal directly with hotels and service providers, unlike traditional brick and mortar tour operators. The latter also charge a service fee, making them more expensive than the free services offered online.

Says Sameer Patil, head-marketing, arzoo.com: “Currently, online portals offer better deals than tour agencies with offers like up to 50% cash back on various travel products.” Is this really true? We decided to put it to a random test and found that booking online can be at least as cheap.

But remember, that’s only if you do your homework. Kartik Teltia, a Delhi-based MNC executive, got a good deal thanks to a spur-of-themoment decision to call a travel agent. Teltia had planned a trip to Germany during the FIFA World Cup and had scoured the Net for deals on hotels and flights, as well as sightseeing. Just before he paid up, however, he decided to call his travel agent to see what the difference in rates would be. To his surprise, the agent offered him a far better deal on flights than he was able to get online. Hotel room rates, however, proved cheaper online. “I managed to get the best of both worlds to maximise my savings,” says Teltia.

That’s just one of the reasons why travel agents and tour operators have not folded their tents and vanished into the night. Sandeep Murthy, CEO, Cleartrip, explains: “For products that require a high level of counselling and customisation, a travel agent is a good choice.” In other words, tour agents offer more options for group travel and complex itineraries covering various destinations and modes of travel. As Farheen Syeda, executive, outbound tours, Stic Group, puts it, “We can offer a wealth of information during our first-hand interactions which is not possible for online portals.”

The key to intelligent travel is to know when to rely on a travel site and when to turn to a travel operator. While the Internet empowers you to plan and manage the trip of your dreams on your own, with the added advantage of being able to compare products and rates with other portals without getting off your chair, travel agents bring to the table knowledge and long-time associations with a host of travelrelated vendors.

The good news is that traditional tour agents are waking up to the potential of the online model. Most major players have a website now. Says Ashutosh Mehere, vice-president, Flexihol: “For us, online is another distribution tool. It’s a natural extension of the business, making things easier for the traveller.”

Apart from flight bookings, Cox and King’s portal features an innovative “Dare to Compare” facility where it compares its international packages with similar offerings from its biggest competitors, on one screen. On their part, purely online portals will have to invest in better technology to bring more products and services on board. Products like voice-enabled interaction, highly sophisticated customisation tools and dynamic packaging will enable customers to book complex itineraries online. We already have travel insurance being sold online; will we also see online visa services in the next few years?

In future, once online travel achieves critical mass in India, the age of consolidation will begin. There may be a limited number of players then so be prepared to pay for the service. Several industry heads claim that this is an eventual reality since globally airlines have started moving towards a zerocommission structure and online models will need to charge a fee to survive but others feel that margins would still be enough to cover up for costs and make reasonably good profits. But one thing is for sure. To stay in the game travel service providers will need to woo customers with a wide range of offerings— think dynamic packaging— which means better deals for you as a customer. So where are you headed this summer?

WHO OFFERS WHAT

The table (Travel Sites Ready Reckoner) shows how 12 portals stand up to each other in terms of specific parameters. These 12 portals were chosen from 25 fully functional online travel portals. We ignored sites like Flight Raja and At Your Price, which focus solely on flight bookings, and hotel-specific portals like Lomanika and Travel Paisa. Cheap Tickets and Travel Doors, both portals that cover Indian destinations and airlines were dropped because they are not “Indian” portals. Portals like Ixigo and Trip Mela were also left out of the reckoning as they function only as aggregators. Remember that the list you see is not exhaustive—it’s only indicative of what’s available online. Because hotels and flights are the most popular categories, we decided to run two parallel comparisons to gauge which site offered the cheapest deals in each sphere.

Flights: While comparing air fares, we zeroed in on five airlines, Jet Airways, Kingfisher, Jetlite, SpiceJet and Indian, on four sectors— Delhi-Mumbai, Mumbai-Bengaluru, Delhi-Chennai and Delhi-Jammu. One flight each of Air Deccan and GoAir on the Mumbai-Bengaluru and Delhi-Mumbai route was also monitored to get a sense of how low-cost carriers were placed on the portals. Since not all airlines operate on all routes–for instance SpiceJet is the only low-cost carrier flying between Delhi and Jammu— only 20 flights were tracked for the same day, May 16, on each of the 12 portals listed in the table.

As always, while culling out information that will be useful to you, we found several interesting facts. The most interesting was that Make My Trip’s much-touted lowest fare guarantee is not always true. Furthermore, some airlines have a tie-up with specific portals, such as GoAir’s tie-up with Yatra, so you know where to head for the best deals if your preferred airline has signed such a partnership.

Lesson number two: even if a portal represents or has tied up with a particular airline, it’s not necessary that all flights of the carrier will be listed. Also, an airline partner may not be listed for select routes. So, you still have to trawl various sites for the best deal. But if you are crunched for time, you won’t go wrong if you limit yourself to JourneyMart, Make My Trip and Arzoo.

Hotels: This study, which started off very optimistically, ended more than a bit flat. To begin with, not all portals featured all the hotels on our shortlist, so a price comparison was impossible. However, the key takeaway here is that the sites which ace in the cheap airfare contest fall behind when it comes to offering competitive room tariffs. JourneyMart, Travelguru and Travelocity came out as the portals through which you stand to get the best hotel deals. If you are looking for dirt-cheap accommodation, then Arzoo is a clear winner— the cheapest hotel listed for Goa and Manali are Rs 600 and Rs 700 respectively, beating the other portals by at least Rs 120. It is very possible that tables would turn if you include airfares and cab rates.

Is there a huge price difference between the portals? Sometimes, there’s a difference of over Rs 1,000 between sites, so always compare. That’s why we’ve gone through a month of comparing portals, sifting through fares and tracking rates.