Just in time for the new year, online travel agent Cleartrip has partnered with the travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler India to introduce a co-branded curated theme-based holiday guides section called ‘Collections‘.
At launch, Cleartrip is offering 45 collections covering holiday themes in India and outside and the company aims to offer a curated list of destinations, activities, travel themes and hotels through this initiative.
When we checked, we noticed that one can head over to the Collections section and browse through various holiday-themed travel guides. These include short holiday ideas like weekend getaways from cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru as well as long holidays for countries like Vietnam, Maldives, Turkey, Greek Islands and others.
There are also guides for special holiday experiences like the best pastry places in Paris, best visa-free places for Indians, Shopping guide for Dubai, Biking guide for Ladakh and quirky ones like best Mumbai hotels for celeb spotting.
Considering that the focus here is travel inspiration, the layout features a lot of photos and is quite visually appealing. It has also been made responsive in nature. One can click on any of the holiday guides to browse through a list of places along with a description on each of these places. There are also travel tips from Condé Nast Traveler and other relevant information like best time to visit the location.
In addition to this, Cleartrip has integrated other services like its route finding and booking service Waytogo, its travel search engine Small World and its hotel booking service to each location depending on the place. We also noticed that Cleartrip has started suggesting these collections as travel inspiration ideas in its Small World service. It will be interesting to see if these guides are also featured on Condé Nast Traveller’s print and digital editions in the future.
Last month, Cleartrip had partnered with Nimbuzz to enable travel booking through the app. It had also partnered Melbourne-based Rome2Rio to launch Waytogo and partnered RedBus & Travelyaari to launch bus ticketing service in July 2013.
In October 2013, travel planning website Mygola which allows users to create custom itineraries had raised $1.5 million from Helion Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital while Bangalore based experience travel marketplace Thrillophilia had raised $200,000 in angel funding led by Hyderabad Angels with participation from iLabs Venture Capital Fund, Navlok Ventures and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE-IIMA) in September 2013.
