@drukair flights show up on @cleartrip, but schedules are wrong

Booking a Druk Air ticket is always an interesting challenge. Once upon a time you had no choice but to use an agent in Bhutan. Then came online reservations using Druk Air's website, with its own idiosyncrasies. But recently I noticed that Cleartrip, the Indian online booking engine, shows Druk Air flights on its search results.

Now that's new. Searching for a flight from Paro to Bagdogra I found a price that is higher than the official Druk Air rate. Also, flights seemed to be available on all days of the week, which is strange. All in all, it seems all this is new and still not ironed out, so I wouldn't recommend being the first to try it out. But with Drukair facing competition in the future, uploading their flights into international booking engines is the way to go.

Lots of (Imaginary) New @DrukAir Flights to Kolkata

With the aim of 100,000 tourists visiting the country this year, and double that five years from now, a major requirement is increasing the capacity of flights to/from the country. I was glad to read about Druk Air's announcement of additional flights on their website. I checked the schedule of flights to Kolkata on the Druk Air website and at first site it seemed too good to be true: flights every day except Friday!

I then tried booking the Wednesday flight on May 16, 2012 and got a catch-22 error message:

So is there a Wednesday flight or not? If some of these flights don't exist, why not post a monthly schedule with exact dates when real flights take off? Druk Air might want to consider some usability testing of their website if it is to be used for online booking by simple people like us.

Or maybe this is the remainder of yesterday's April Fools' day prank?

Using Cleartrip for online booking on Indian Railways

Is there anything more romantic than riding the train in India? From the early morning cries of the chai wallahs to the breathtaking scenery to being fed by a Marwari family, this is, truly, incredible India.

And booking tickets online on Bharatiya Rail has never been easier. Until a couple of years ago, IRCTC's chaotic website was the only option. But now there's a much better alternative: cleartrip.com. Apart from the much cleaner design and a very fast and intuitive user-interface, cleartrip.com accepts international credit cards, which IRCTC does not. cleartrip also offers airline and hotel bookings.

Another neat feature of cleartrip is its always-in-beta Indian Railways availability calendar. Just enter any two stations, the desired class, and a date range, and cleartrip will quickly display a color-coded availability matrix.