Inasra:: Find hotel rooms – any range, any city
Inasra, a chennai based startup aims to solve the major pain in the Indian travel industry – finding hotels as per one’s requirement.
Though other travel players (like makemytrip) too offer a similar service of hotel reservation, but it’s mostly through their partner channels (that too in selected cities).
And most of the times, it may not serve one’s need (will you use makemytrip to book/find a hotel within a range of Rs. 500/per day for your 1-day visit via train from Bangalore to Chennai? I will not).
Inasra plans to cover all of the Indian cities and their hotels (even the ones which haven’t heard of Internet). And that means they are directly competing with TravelGuru and Travelocity.
As they mention:
We bring hotels closer to you…not just hotels that are net savvy but also hotels that have never heard of the Internet or for that matter who associate computer to a TV like thingy.
What separates Inasra from others is it’s focused effort on hotel search. As of this date, they have covered 80000 rooms in 3000 hotels across 300 cities in India, and the room prices range from Rs. 250 to 45,000 – so take your pick!.
Also, Inasra’s AJAXed UI and the overall presentation makes the product easier to use. The simplicity of UI might turn out to be their second biggest strength (first one is of course the no. of hotels they index). TravelGuru really has a long way to go as far as usability is concerned.
In future, Inasra plans to complete the entire cycle of travel/shelter related segment (Flights, Tours, Service Apartments…) and it would be interesting to watch them compete against their well-funded competitors.
Products like Inasra are serving a vertical niche and are also providing transparency in the entire reservation process; and I do see them partnering with other vertical scrapers like iXiGo or even city specific portals.
And of course, being a vertical player always has an advantage of good brand recall and perception mapping (e.g, google = search, amazon = books, ebay = auction). What do you say?
Give Inasra a spin and do share your comments.
Related : Complete coverage of Indian travel industry(who does what) | Product Review : iXIGotags: inasra, travelguru
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This is the best I have noticed on a INDIAN Web 2.0 circuit…u guys rock…. brilliant product….!!
cheers
sites like Travelocity have a huge spending power (on marketing/partnerships etc)…How do these guys plan to compete with them?
Interesting product..
Yes Sri – I too liked the overall clean UI and sleek features!
@ Shantanu – at times, when the competitor is too big, the easiest thing to do is to build a “simple” solution (that’s what Google did with it’s search box).
Insara rocks. This is what I have been looking for some time in the space. Added to the excellent search, their simple approach makes it my fav. hotel search of choice.
With some user participation and reviews/ratings for hotels, I am sure it will be big in the times to come.
[...] that Desiya has been lapped up, its time for Inasra to kick [...]
I happened to book a room in sunderban hotel, Pune, through inasra a few weeks ago, making full advance payment and getting the adequate confirmation and receipt. But, on arrival today December 25, the hotel reception tells me that there has been no booking and they have not received payment. Whom should I believe?
Nevertheless, the hotel has a room available and makes us pay a second time… We are going to report to police, suspecting that the scam may well be the hotel’s, linked to the Osho ashram.
[...] RupeeMail , KyaZoonga.. , Webvastra , Zendle , BeatofIndia , YouMagix, iXiGo , anEcho , GeoBeats , Inasra , myMuv , 90di, OffersforShoppers , RouteGuru , Saywit , Toufee , Dealaajtak,FunPiper,Dealmaadi , [...]
[...] Inasra: Product: Inasra – a hotel booking service, Inasra goes a level deep and covers more than the hotels. Their coverage includes (apart from the regular hotels) service apartments, cheap hotels – right from price range of 300 – 45K! Read our review here [...]
i recently used that site and found some great deals. I wull be travelling again to india and am lloking for ward to have more bookings
[...] hotel comparison engine is not a new idea – iXiGo, ClearTrip , inasra are doing it – so essentially, ghumichalge needs to define the differentiation [...]
I made my first ever online hotel booking through Inasra.com. I didn’t even know about them before I booked. It’s only after that I used them, I searched about them on the net and found this article! They really do cover hotels that are not usually found on TravelGuru, Yatra, Travelocity etc. What you find on all these sites is the same list of hotels and almost the same range of prices etc. These guys have taken extra pain to collect information about most of the hotels they list. They have spent a great amount of time not only designing the UI but also collecting information from the hotels. I had a great experience with Inasra. I will definitely sue them in the future.
One point to note – If you book a room through Inasra, but don’t find any records of the bookig at the hotel its the fault of the hotel not Inasra. Since Inasra is also booking for a lot of hotels which are not net savvy, they may not actually make the actual booking when they get a notification from Inasra or any other OTA. OTAs inform the hotels through email and phone but sometimes hotels fail to act on that and forget to reserve the room. Its good to confirm your booking with the hotel by phone after booking through an OTA. Inasra game me complete contact details of the hotel I had booked, I called them immediately and confirm that they had indeed received the booking and that a room will be reserved for me. The owner of that hotel even mentioned to me that Inasra confirms the reservation with the guests after they are checked in, so if they find a hotel is not giving rooms even after Inasra’s confimrations, they will simply stop booking for that hotel. I am yet to make my trip so I am not sure if this is true but if it is then it’s definitely a value added service that I am sure no other big OTA is providing.