Cleartrip

Cleartrip (previously known as Cleartrip Travel Services Private Limited) is a global online travel company, headquartered in Mumbai and Dubai. The company operates an online travel aggregator website for booking flights and train tickets, hotel reservations, and activities in India and the Middle East countries. It has offices across India, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
History.
Cleartrip was founded in 2006 as a hotels and air aggregator by Hrush Bhatt, Matthew Spacie and Stuart Crighton. Seeing the fragmentation that existed in the Indian travel and hospitality sector, the founders decided to enter the online travel space.
Cleartrip also operates Cleartrip for Business, an online corporate travel management tool; Agent Box, a travel tool for travel agents; and Cleartrip Mobile, a travel booking app for mobile devices. In 2012, it added new services such as Quickeys, for last-minute deals on hotel booking and other journey planning services. In April 2012, Cleartrip launched iOS app with a split-screen search feature to enable round-trip search results. Its app also came with geo-location feature to choose the airport for departure from the current location. The search platform of the app also allows to swap the from and to cities with a tap. The app is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad.
In January 2013, Cleartrip brought air, rail and bus tickets to Apple's Passbook. The same year the company undertook a massive UI redesign project, Tuxedo where every field in the website was thought through in terms of placement, display, action.
In 2014, Cleartrip Mobile was recognized as part of Apple's Best of 2014 Trends of the year and also featured as the ‘Editor's Pick.
In 2015, Cleartrip became the first Indian online travel agency to feature on Apple Watch and by the end of 2015, its app traffic had overtaken web traffic and accounted for 59 per cent of its total traffic. By May 2016 nearly 75% of Cleartrip's traffic was coming via mobile.
In April 2018, Cleartrip launched an Arabic version of its website to target the growing Arabic community in the GCC region.
In May 2018, Cleartrip launched an app for Amazon's Alexa voice assistant that enables Alexa users to voice search air travel options.
With gross booking value of $1.4 billion and revenues worth of $110 million, Cleartrip has annual growth of over 40% in MENA, driven by the increasing shift from offline to online.
In 2018, Cleartrip was named as one among the only two companies that followed the GDPR and allowed users to delete personal information associated with their accounts.
Partnership.
The company got into strategic partnerships expanding the footprint of its integrated travel services in 48 European and 18 Southeast Asian countries. In 2017, Google announced partnership with Cleartrip for its flight search application, Google Flights. In June 2018, Cleartrip announced its partnership with Kerala Tourism Development Corporation to become an online seller of KTDC's exclusive set of activities. In November 2019, Cleartrip entered into a partnership with PAYBACK India to offer loyalty program.
In 2019, Amazon partnered with Cleartrip in its first-ever global foray into flight bookings space.
In 2021, after a financially stressful COVID-19 pandemic for the business and having laid off 500 employees, Cleartrip entered acquisition talks with Flipkart in a distress sale for $40 million.
Geographic Expansion.
In May 2010, Cleartrip launched its first overseas venture in the UAE. In May 2012, it started services to the Persian Gulf nations of Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. On June 21, 2018, Cleartrip announced the acquisition of Saudi Arabia-based online travel aggregator Flyin.