Travel tools - MustSeeIndia.com review

I recently wrote about reviewing two travel tools. Here's the first of them, on MustSeeIndia., which has been operational for a few years now, and so should be fairly well stabilised.

First impressions

Overall, the interfacing is simple. What you see is what you get, by and large. It starts off with the homepage where you indicate your preferred location(s), duration of stay, and start date. You can customise your options across 4 sections - Accommodation, Transportation, Sightseeing, Inclusions - and conclude with the Itinerary.

Because I recently spent some limited time in Jaipur, I decided to use that as the testing ground for this review. I selected a 4 night stay, starting 23 December 2013.

Making your choices

The first step is to select the accommodation. The website provides a reasonable set of hotel choices, with the indicated prices being pegged to the cheapest hotel. Prices are displayed for the entire stay, and not on a per-night basis. As you click through and customise your stay, the price displayed on the top right corner keeps changing real-time. What isn't clear, is whether you have the ability to earn points on your stays - certainly there is no mention at any stage, of providing your loyalty program information. What isn't also intuitive is the number of persons - the site presumes 2 people, but it can be edited just below where the price is displayed.

I like the fact that there are summary hotel reviews and ratings (presumably sourced from TripAdvisor) for each of the hotels on display.

There's also a further choice of room options and meal plans (interesting but expensive, in my view), that you can select from. For the purpose of my review, I did not make any additional choices, but if you did select from these, the price is updated accordingly.

I selected the Ramada, because it was a global chain and also because I could find readily comparable prices. Interestingly, the website claims that the normal price would have been Rs 42,000 but that their price is Rs 19,764 (taxes inclusive) - and so a savings of over Rs 22,000.

However, on Ramada's website, I can find rooms for the same dates, starting at Rs 17,187 for a normal twin room, going up to Rs 18,906 for a club room (taxes inclusive).

Same goes for any supplements that may be there - optional or mandatory (such as Christmas Eve and New Year Eve dinners).

In any case, while there are a fairly reasonable number of options, I can't see any of the 5-star properties being listed here. Jaipur has tons of them, including the ITC Rajputana and the Fairmont Jaipur.

Moving on...next comes transportation. Again, the choices here are interesting - there are options to travel from a nearby city (either by bus or a hired private taxi - in the case of the latter, its for the entire trip), or local pick up from the airport/railway station/bus terminus. Both options are useful, and I think it would've been great if you could specify a "From" city, and they provided air and rail options as well, along with fares.

Next, you add your preferred sightseeing options from the ones listed. Each one is priced separately, but I fear there may be overlaps between two or more options, needs to be kept in mind. Another option would be to just do your own research on the places you want to visit, and then get the hotel to arrange for local transport.

After all your options are finalised, you can view your inclusions and itinerary - however, I think it is fairly simplistic and pedestrian as it stands - maybe a little more detail could be incorporated here.

Then you move on to either saving your itinerary and coming back to it later, or concluding it by going to the booking and payment section. If you save your itinerary, this is followed up by emails to your specified mailing address. The trip is saved, and can be accessed at any time for further edits.

If you choose to go ahead with the booking, then you are presented with payment options, which I found rather good. I did not experiment with an actual booking, and so I'm unable to offer comments on possible changes to itinerary after payments are made.

Conclusion

While there are quite a few shortcomings / areas for improvement, the portal itself provides a rough and ready guide to doing things in a place you propose to visit. Also, I love the fact that virtually all major costs (with the possible exception of travel) are considered, and can be booked and paid for at one go and in one place, without having to get into multiple transactions. In all, my conclusion is that MustSeeIndia is a good tool that needs some more spit and polish to become a great tool.

PS: Images used above are extracts from the MustSeeIndia.com website, and all copyrights are owned by them.