iXiGO.com partners with Air Valid for user-generated airline ratings

Online, October 27, 2009 (Newswire.com) - New Delhi, October 27th, 2009 - iXiGO.com ( www.ixigo.com ), India's fastest-growing travel site has partnered with Air Valid, the world's leading airline information, opinions and reviews site, to display user generated qualitative airline ratings in iXiGO.com's international flight search results.

With the addition of user-generated ratings for various airline qualitative factors, iXiGO.com has become the first travel site in India to offer more than just airfare and schedule information in order to help Indian air passengers make more qualified decisions when choosing one airline over another. The qualitative user-rated factors integrated into iXiGO.com's airline filters include seat comfort, seat pitch, punctuality, attitude of the crew, cleanliness of the plane, condition of the luggage upon arrival and overall quality of aircrafts.

Commenting on the partnership, Aloke Bajpai, Founder & CEO, iXiGO.com said, "Travelers seek advice from other travelers before booking hotels. We don't see why it should be any different for flights. For the same reason, Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) are now investing in improvement of quality of service factors for building differentiation." Rajnish Kumar, Co-Founder & CTO added - "Our user analytics shows that passengers do not make choices solely driven by price, specially for international travel. Factors like on-time performance, comfort, seat-spacing, level of service and cleanliness vary from one airline to the other, influencing the choice of airline, specially on competitive routes where fares are similar across carriers."

Air Valid has aggregated over 114,000 certified airline reviews from passengers of 261 airlines across 13,000 routes around the world and has launched a dedicated website for the Indian market www.air-valid.in a few months ago, with its flight searches being powered by iXiGO.com. Arnaud Bilquez, Founder-CEO, Air Valid said - "Air Valid's user-generated airline opinions/ratings and iXiGO.com's market-leading airfare search engine are perfect partners for providing neutral, unbiased information to travelers for making more informed choices while searching and booking their flights."

iXiGO.com, the leading travel search engine in South Asia, has been a pioneer of several innovations in the Indian online travel industry including air fare outlook graphs, airfare RSS feeds, mobile search, complex airfare search on multiple airlines over multiple hops, integration of regional/international low cost carriers, travel search widgets etc. iXiGO.com was named a top-100 technology innovator by India's National Association of Software & Services Companies (NASSCOM) in 2008.

About Air Valid:

Air Valid® gathers and publishes online information on 1220 airlines, 114,300 certified traveler opinions and 47,000 flight numbers from 261 airlines for travelers and travel agencies since January 2007. Air Valid® also offers services to travelers such as "Seat Pitch" comparison guide for 156 airlines in economic class and many other travel widgets for the travel industry.

Air Valid® is now present on air-valid.com for the French market plus air-valid.co.uk, air-vaid.es, air-valid.de, air-valid.in, airvalidchina.cn and air-valid.us. In July 2009, Air Valid has launched eezeer.com, the 1st social network dedicated to travelers who can now tweet, post comments, photos and reviews directly from their mobiles or iPhone to the community with a dedicated application on Android called EezeeRATOR®.

For more information about Air Valid, visit www.air-valid.in

About iXiGO.com:

iXiGO.com is India's leading online & mobile travel search engine based out of Gurgaon. iXiGO.com searches across multiple airlines, hotels, trains and bus booking sites to find the best travel deals. Launched in June 2007 by IIT, INSEAD and Amadeus alumni Aloke Bajpai, Rajnish Kumar and Dharmendra Yashovardhan, iXiGO.com has been recognized by NASSCOM as India's Top-100 Innovator. BusinessToday and Wall Street Journal/Mint have named it among India's 10 hottest startups in 2008 for its unique market approach, product usability, and passionate management team.

iXiGO is backed by BAF Spectrum, a Singapore-based seed-investment fund. For more information about iXiGO, visit www.ixigo.com or m.ixigo.com (mobile).

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