hrush bhatt

There will rarely be any person who doesn’t want to travel. Travelling is fun, exciting and connects you to a new world. Thanks to the various portals for ticket and hotel bookings, travelling has become easier and relaxing. But if we go over 15 years ago, the case was not the same. There were no online portals for bookings, and people relied upon the traditional inconvenient methods of travelling. This was the same time when not everyone had got access to the internet.

In the mid-2000s, Facebook was making the buzz and no one, at least in India, was thinking of making train and hotel bookings over the Internet. But then, Hrush Bhatt came with the idea of establishing an online website, where people could easily book hotels, trains and even flights.

Bhatt is an Indian entrepreneur, who used to travel across India, with his maternal family, a lot. He loved travelling and had been to the U.S. quite sometimes. Bhatt was an alumnus at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, where he studied economics and history. While studying, he wrote for the college newspaper, and even, received an Apple Macintosh for his work, upon which he started learning to design.

Bhatt completed his graduation in 1998 and came back to India, where he started working at Plexus Technologies as the lead designer. Here he worked for a year and got to learn a lot about eCommerce. During his job at Plexus Technologies, he became the part of the launch team of Indiatimes.com, as the lead consultant.

After leaving the job at Plexus Technologies, Bhatt launched a startup named Paper Plane, a consulting firm and a digital agency. But like every other startup, this one also could not do very well.

With the failure of Paper Plane, Bhatt was quite discouraged and frustrated. But this frustration led him to found Cleartrip, India’s biggest travel booking portal. Bhatt, along with his co-founders Stuart Crighton and Mathew Spacie, started building a website for his new startup, i.e. a travel booking agency. Stuart Crighton has the experience in the field of hospitality as he was the former COO at Cox n’ Kings.

It just took nine months for the co-founders to build a good website and invite investors to invest in their idea. In 2006, they officially launched Cleartrip. Since it was quite an unusual idea for the investor of India, the company had to struggle to convince them. Despite the uniqueness of the startup idea, Cleartrip took no time to reach people and become popular, as soon as it was launched. Interestingly, the company did not offer any discounts to the users, but its quality service drew most of its customers. The company mainly focused on travellers who travel a lot, instead of the ones who made trip plans once in a year.

In 2011, Cleartrip launched Express Way, a one-click method, to help the users to store their travel and payment details securely on the platform. The company introduced its first mobile app in 2012, both for iOS and Android, providing its users with an intuitive interface and seamless booking processes. The company was dealing in booking for flights, trains and hotels in all parts of India.

In 2016, Cleartrip introduced a new feature to its users, PriceLock that, as the name suggests, allows the users to lock the prices of flights. In the same year, it also launched Cleartrip Local, another feature that enables the users to find out activities they can do in the nearby area.

In 2017, the company offered the users to pay through Apple Pay and also introduced new features named Cleartrip Stories and Instant Search. Cleartrip Stories allowed users to share their experiences with their friends and family over their Cleartrip profile. Instant Search helped the users to search and make bookings even faster. In the same year, Google partnered with Cleartrip for its flight search application, Google Flights.

In 2018, the company expanded its services to the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region, and in July month of the same year, Cleartrip acquired Flyin, a Saudi Arabia-based online travel aggregating company.

After acquiring Flyin, Cleartrip started working in Arabic countries more actively. So to make the processes more convenient, the company launched the Arabic version of the website in 2018.

The maximum average revenue that the company makes is worth $110 million, selling over seven million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights a year. Cleartrip, currently, is serving in 48 European and 18 Southeast Asian countries. The company has also established separate services for corporate users named Cleartrip Business. It has also introduced a travel tool, Agent Box, for the agents.

Cleartrip has won many awards for its service in India and abroad, including ‘Most Innovative Companies in Asia’, ‘India’s Best Travel Website’, ‘Product of the Year – Travel Category’, ‘Best Mobile App for Travel’, etc.