Surf up

A new portal that doubles up as your travel agent.

What's it?

The newest entrant on the travel portal block "" www.yatra.com. Launched early this year, the website has all the regular travel related information like pricing, availability, reservations for airlines, hotels, buses and car rentals across 5,000 cities and smaller towns across India.

You can also book holiday packages and if you are travelling to a new city, Yatra's city guides are fairly useful (though we think the language tips need some sprucing up and information like emergency numbers and night hangouts need some serious updating). For those seeking a second opinion, look up the traveller reviews.

How does it work?

You could start by registering for free on the website; this way you will get regular email alerts on new deals and save some precious Internet time when you make the next booking as the user info gets saved on Yatra's server.

If you are looking to book airline tickets, the lowest fares offered by a choice of four airlines pops up on the screen. The only downer is that the displayed price is the average per person price and does not include taxes.

And this when other portals like makemytrip.com and cleartrip.com display the price as soon as the flight is selected. The car bookings section on Yatra is good: car types with the respective rentals are displayed on your screen after you run a search.

The hotel bookings are pretty neat too "" we like the day wise break up fares. Once you make the bookings, you are notified via email or an sms on your phone. Payments can be made via credit cards, direct bank debits and ITZ cash cards.

Why are we writing about it?

Well, for starters, the website is user-friendly. We like the look, navigation is easy. And, more importantly, we think that the drag slider on Yatra that appears when you are booking an airline ticket and lets you shuffle between arrival/departure times and the price is a very handy feature.

Only thing lacking is the cancellation procedure "" first, you have to call customer support and second, you get the refund only after a month.

What's in it for me?

What does a travel agent do for you? Tell you about all the exotic and lovely places that you can visit, estimate the damages to your pocket, make all the bookings and do the running around. Well, imagine being able to do all this yourself, without really having to move an inch and you'll know what we're talking about.

What are the damages?

In a nutshell, the price to surf the Net for an hour or even less if the connectivity is good.