Many have suffered while booking flights through agent sites like Makemytrip.com. The problems with cancellation or modification happens because it is a third party site and not at all related to the airline. They are only interested in taking money for a booking, not in providing after sales service. I have seen many reviews where users didn’t get refund when cancelling a ticket, or are charged much higher for cancellation than they would have if they had done it directly from the airline, or are not informed of the correct flight timing(especially painful if it is a connecting or transit flight) or are not informed even when the flight was cancelled days ago! Or worst still, being charged all the money but getting confirmation at the last moment or not getting confirmation or PNR and facing last day hassles at the airport.
The solution to all of this is to directly book on the airlines’ site. You will get all information and confirmation first hand. But it introduces a new problem that it takes time and pain to search and compare different sites for price and timings. But all this is solved if you use ixigo.com. This gives you perfectly updated search results for flights in one go. It doesn’t charge you anything extra for booking those tickets(unline sites like Makemytrip, cleartrip, yatra, ezeego, travelguru etc that charge around 150-250 rs extra for a single ticket) and when you click on the link, it directly takes you to the airline’s site with that particular search. Most airlines offer multiple payment modes and do offer web check in. Some like spicejet even offers an option of ordering meals online.
This site also has some really innovative features(they even give credit to the users of the site for their recommendations) like:
1> Fare Alerts
Just enter your email ID, a source and a destination, and the fare that you’d like to be alerted for. If say you want to be alerted if the price of Mum-Del flight drops below 3500 rs on a specific date(or period), it will send you a notification if it does. This is particularly useful if you know there are special discounts or schemes coming up but don’t know exactly when and don’t want to miss them out either.
2> Fare Outlook
A graph showing price trends across all airlines for a chosen sector for a chosen period. Very useful if you have a travel window and want to check out which airline is offering the cheapest rate in that window. E.g. if you want to travel from Mum-Del and back in the month of August, this graph will help you decide the date and airline in one glance.
3> Fare Mapper
Just choose an origin city. This shows a map of destinations(of India and the world) with the cheapest fare(one fare for each destination). This will help you decide if you want to fly for a holiday and want to decide the destination based on flight price. E.g. I just put Mum as the origin city, and it showed me that a flight on Air India Express to Mangalore is available for just 1582 rs. on Aug 2.
4> Simultaneous Hotels and partner agent sites
While searching for flights, it offers you an option(check box) to search for hotels in the destination city on the same date from popular websites in the same search. It also gives you an option of including agent sites like goibibo, travelocity and akbartravelsonline if you want to widen your search and are ready to take the risk of booking through agent sites.
I definitely recommend this site for booking flights as it is not an agent site or a third party site. It never gets involved in the booking process so you will never face any problems the way you would if you use third party sites. I am guessing it derives its revenue from the airline and partner sites each time a link provided in the search result is clicked. So if you want to book flight tickets, do use this site instead of makemytrip.com