The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm | Hacker News Reader

The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm

mobocube.com

83 pointsSingAlong33 comments

Hi,

My name is Hrush. I am one of Cleartrip's founders and I'd like to clarify how things actually work.

Firstly, the "X seats left" feature is not an 'algorithm' at all. It is a simple count of the number of 'seats remaining' at a specific price point for a specific flight departure.

In the example illustrated in the post, there is only a single seat left at a price point of Rs. 34,255. This does not mean that there is only one seat left on the flight, it means there is only one seat left at that specific price.

When the search was repeated for 2 travellers, the price per person increased to 35,746, and then increased to Rs. 37,008 per person when the search was done for 4 travellers.

Airline pricing is based on 'fare classes' or 'buckets'. Buckets typically work like this:

1. Each bucket is allocated a fixed number of seats.

2. Each bucket is associated with exactly one price point

3. When there are no more seats available in a bucket, seats from the next highest bucket are displayed and so on

At Cleartrip, we work hard to give our customers the best prices. We never have and never will engage in the "fake scarcity tactics" that this post accuses us of.

I'd also like to point out again that we have a tool tip on the button that clearly reads that there are 'X seats left at this price'.

The screenshots in the article support your statement. However, don't you think this is practice grossly misleading? It's common, especially on low-cost flights, to gradually ramp up the seat price as the tickets are sold. Sometimes (and this seems to be such an example), this means no single seat costs the same as the next one sold - but that doesn't mean there are huge price differences between buying seat n and n+1.

Don't you agree that the user's perception of this UI is that fake scarcity tactics are being employed?

Udo -- the practice of ramping prices up and down is called Yield Management and is a commonplace strategy for suppliers of perishable inventory such as airlines and hotels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management

We wanted to our users to be able see how long a price point is going to remain available. Our hope is that most users will be able to make better decisions about whether to book immediately or to wait a little longer.

With respect to whether the price differences are huge or not, the prices are going to be higher. Travel is an extremely price-sensitive category and India is an extremely price-sensitive market. So, in our opinion, this feature lets users make better decisions.

Since the button seems to be causing some confusion, we'll see what we can do to best improve it.

I feel that maybe I didn't express myself clearly, apologies. The main point from a user experience design perspective here isn't that Yield Management is happening (which is perfectly OK, the article just didn't recognize it). Instead it's this:

> We wanted to our users to be able see how long a price point is going to remain available.

On a flight where every single seat represents a discrete price point, this information becomes dubious at best. What's more, the UI on your website makes the semantics of this very murky, culminating in unnecessary misunderstandings like this article.

To make it perfectly clear: I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with your business practices. Instead, the fault lies with your user interface for not making the distinction clear between the number of seats available on the flight in general and the number of seats left at the current price point (which is almost ALWAYS equal to the number of seats the user has requested).

Perhaps "1 seat left at this price" would be a less confusing.

Yep. We agree that we need to work on improving the design of the feature and we will be doing just that. “X seats left at this price” is a better label, but may be too long to fit for the way it is currently designed, so we will need to think about how we can best convey the information better.

Sounds like a minor usability problem has cost you a potential customer. The question is how many other customers have had the same problem but not bothered to write blog posts.

Relying on tooltips is probably a bad idea. Maybe change the button text to 'X seats at this price'. Don't make me think. :-)

On the bright side, be thankful for the good user feedback. I wish everyone who stopped using my product wrote a blog post.

This made them a ton of customers who read the label as everyone else, felt pressured and bought the ticket [].

[] Not that I endorse that practice.

Can you give an example (perhaps with a screenshot) where cleartrip shows more than one seat left when someone searches for one ticket?

Edit: Just saw another person's reply that it does indeed happen sometimes.

In my opinion, you're skating on thin ice with this explanation. I have no doubt that this is exactly how the feature works. However, you're posting in a community full of entrepreneurs and marketers. We KNOW that presenting scarcity (real or not) is a great way of influencing the buy decision.

You will never convince anyone here that the wording of the badge wasn't deliberately designed to promote the feeling of scarcity.

What I'm suggesting, however, is that this isn't really a bad thing. It's a little tough to call you guys out on the practice of optimizing the site for sales... we'd all be very hypocritical if we did that (since the next popular article on HN is just as likely to be a treatise on the fine art of A/B testing the wording on a "try it now" button).

I think what everyone is asking for is just that you say "yes, our tests showed this wording worked very well to increase purchases. However, perhaps we went a little too far. We'll reword the button."

What you SHOULDN'T expect is for any of your peers on this site to honestly believe the connotation of your explanation, which seems to be "the badge OBVIOUSLY represents the number of seats left at this price, instead of seats left on the flight. But since a few people have this weird interpretation, we'll change it just for you."

But you know what... I suspect it's all moot. I'm sure the way it's worded now ultimately generates the highest sense of urgency in the customer, but "1 left at this low price" probably generates a similar urgency.

To be perfectly honest, we didn't test for differently worded labels at all. So, we'd be outright lying if we said what you're asking us to.

We agree that we need to work on improving the design of the feature and we will be doing just that. “X seats left at this price” is a better label, but may be too long to fit for the way it is currently designed, so we will need to think about how we can best convey the information better.

I was thinking about that. What about an asterisk? Then you could make the tooltip the asterisk expansion. On the bottom of the page, you could also give the expanded version.

This might be the best of both worlds, because you can keep the wording but you also let people know there's more information about what it means.

EDIT: Another idea...

So, you could make the price plus the "x left" be a single graphical unit, thus strongly tying the "x left" to the price, rather than to the seat selection. Then, right below that in a light font, you could say something like "12 left from $y to $z".

So, as an ASCII art example: http://pastebin.com/tS8MPeXK

Great suggestions, thanks a ton for taking the time.

We'll be making some changes to it very soon and we'll post details once the changes are live.

We've pushed out some fixes to the design -- thank you, for your feedback, it was quite helpful in helping us think through the redesign.

http://bit.ly/y3uvv0

I just tested it myself and can't confirm it. I started by searching for a flight for one person and got a few offers which said "3/4 seats left" and if you hover over the image you'll get the alt text "x seats left for that price".

It actually looks like a neat feature which shows you how many seats are left in the cheapest fare group that applies to your settings.

EDIT: I just did some more testing, searching for different person counts, and it does exactly what I thought.

When you get "3 seats left" then you can book for 3 persons for the cheapest price, and whenever you add a 4th person, the price is higher than four times the 1-person price

Pretty inane article and mildly paranoid conclusion. If it had said "x seats available" it would have been grammatically correct but too long for a button. And yes, "algorithm" was geek linkbait.

It basically shows the number of seats left in the same fare-basis. The problem is with the communication, and not the supposed "algorithm".

There's this super-budget airline in Australia, Tiger Airways, so budget that they skimped on training pilots and got shutdown for some time.

Anyway, their website at some point had two hidden features: if you tried to book in a group it would charge you more per person (because you're depriving them of "credit card surcharge") AND just checking the price of a certain flight a certain amount of times (showing interest in that flight) would raise the price by some increment for every other customer on the website automatically.

There's at least one site I know that raises prices when you are re-visiting the specific flight (via cookie tracking).

Is there a reason you can't tell us which one?

This is why I've completely and utterly screened out "limited special offer" anything these days. I will not be conned into not shopping around (which is why they do this, obviously), and I don't buy things unless I need them at the time. Occasaionaly I'll lose out when there genuinely was limited stock available and it was a good price, but overall I'm probabbly better of and certainly less rushed.

All retail (web or bricks-and-mortar) and services advertising is lies pretty much at this point. A colleque gets an SMS from the local Bannatynes gym that he used to be a member of telling him about a limited time "rejoin" offer that has limited places. He has had the same message at least once a month for the last twelve months so basically both the calim of limited places and the claim that it is a limited time offer are basically lies. Or the DFDS sale "you'll never see these prices again!!!!!". The list is endless.

By being dishonest in these ways, some in the retail and services industries are pushing people like me (people with enough money to not mind that they might sometimes pay a little extra in order to avoid being lied to) away.

Having said that, the example given here isn't actually lying (they don't say "only X seats available") though it is misleadingly presented, either accidentally or the site is being deliberately disengneuous, and if that is deliberate than it is little better than a lie.

This is arguably an application of so-called "Dark Patterns"; the black hat of UX design. The red colour, the suggestive copy are all chosen to invoke a sense of urgency. A List Apart has a good article on the subject: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dark-patterns-deception-v...

I think the theme of false urgency/scarcity is the main annoyance of the Cleartrip presentation. The rest of it is just a matter of Cleartrip displaying few seats for a narrow price, vs MakeMyTrip displaying more seats with a wider pricing range.

Since the price is not proportional to the number of passengers, I assume there are only x seats at the displayed price. Still misleading but not es "evil" as otherwise.

PS: I kinda take the word "algorithm" in teh lheadline as link bait. Without it, I would have never klicked the link.

A lot of people are calling this title linkbait for using the word "algorithm". But I think the author is being a bit sarcastic here and hence the title of the post.

P.S: I'm not the author, I only found the article interesting when I found it on twitter.

We've posted a more detailed explanation with screenshots and examples here:

http://bit.ly/yP3muv

Your screenshot shows the tooltip visible, which aren't by default (as already noted by a couple of commenters already).

Someone on twitter mentioned that they had bought some flight tickets only because of this 'confusion' : https://twitter.com/#!/jayeshb/status/162512878287589377

Is that a one-off case because of confusion?

We only launched this feature last week, so it's hard to say whether it's a "one-off" case.

They won't change the interface, as it works for them.

When deciding between being shady and getting more money, and being honest and getting less money, they already chose their side.

We've redesigned the feature now and it is now live in production.

Details of the design changes: http://bit.ly/y3uvv0

PAWNed

Well spotted... although it seems a little generous to call this an algorithm :-)

I am pretty sure I have seen the exact same "trick" being used on sites here in the US - including Kayak, and Orbitz etc. So I don't think Cleartip in the only travel site that does this. And probablly that is how Cleartrip got the idea from. Also, not to defend this practice in any way, but did not the OP realize that the price of the seats was changing each time he increased the number of passengers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com