Inasra July 28, 2007
Posted by Aparna T in : Travel , trackbackInasra was one of the participants at Proto.in 2007, the startup showcase event that we’ve reviewed earlier. Inasra is interesting, as the first one that seems to focus on the India accommodation category, among a large number of travel startups focusing on air tickets or holiday packages.
They have affiliations to 3500 hotels in 400 Indian cities, an easy-to-use website, and all the usual features - search by city and dates of travel, budget, plus a variety of hotel amenities, listing of room rates for different room types, and credit card payment processing. I haven’t found too many sites that list anything below a 3-star hotel, so it’s nice to find some budget hotels here. It works well for large/medium cities or tourist
destinations, though the number of hotels listed for some smaller towns is a lot fewer, and not cheap. Inasra helpfully finds rates and contact info for hotels not affiliated with itself, so that the traveler can book it himself.
Inasra’s Minimum Advance charge on reservation confirmation is non-refundable. This information needs to be a clearly visible Cancellations/Refund Policy link at the top, as is standard among travel sites,
not buried in a small Terms and Conditions link at the bottom of the page.
The other area where improvement is needed is the limited phone support - not available on Sundays, and after 8 pm on other days. One can’t expect a customer who may arrive at a hotel at 9pm on Friday and find the hotel doesn’t have his reservation, to wait till the following Monday 10am to sort it out.
Comments»
Dear Aparna
Inasra’s Minimum Advance policy is a policy from a bygone era where we did not collect all the booking cost upfront, but only a small charge and the rest was paid at the hotel.
I will remove that line from the Terms and Conditions. Apart from that the terms and conditions for a particular booking is stated clearly and concisely on the page before you make the payment.
And regarding the Business hours, that is only for processing new bookings. Other wise we work all through. In fact let me give you a gist of our process
1) Customer makes a booking online
2) Booking is confirmed within 2 1/2 business hours
Hotels Inasra interaction goes here
3) Call up the hotel 2 days before the customer checks-in to make sure they received the payment and that our customers name is there on their reservation list (this helps us in making sure that the scenario you posited does not take place).
4) Call up hotel/customer during the customer’s stated check-in time to make sure that the customer had checked in and had not encountered any problems.
5) Call up again during checkout to again make sure that there was no billing related problems.
And this happens even if the customer is checking-in at 4 Am.
If you have any other queries, please feel free to ask.
And thanks for pointing out the outdated terms. We just shifted our servers and we are still making sure that everything that ought to be running is running.
Love & Regards
Yogi