Inasra Hotel Search in India

I love traveling and travel quite a few times in an year. The most important thing for me, and I guess for folks of my ilk is, finding a decent shelter without straining our purse. To find a place to stay in a big city or a relatively remote place is difficult and with the two constraints mentioned earlier it becomes a nightmare. Inasra a search engine from India promises to just address this issue.

[tHe pRoduct]
Inasra is a search engine for hotels in India. They cover pretty much all the major cities in all the Indian states. With over 3000 hotels across 300 cities there are not many places you would miss out. The best part about the listing is it lets you search the hotels based on various criteria like price,the rating, amenities(Business center, travel desk etc ), cuisines(continental,Chinese etc). You can get details like amenities, cuisines served, tariff structure and other information about all the hotels listed.

[tHe sIte]
It has got one of the most simple and user friendly home page design I have seen in recent times. A simple, to the point home page which concentrates more on the search feature without all the clutter that we get to see with many travel sites(read makemytrip, yatra etc). The basic navigation to hotels in a city and booking a room is pretty straight forward stuff. Intelligent use of Ajax gives it a rich neat look. Unfortunately the good things end here, the site lacks in some of the usability aspects. I will do a detailed review of the site design in a later post.

[tHe vErdict]
Inasra is one of the few, in fact the only search engine, specific to hotel search, in India. It's decent database of hotels and wide reach of cities within India, coupled with cool user interface and excellent search capabilities makes it an automatic choice for me and probably to you. You can read more about Inasra in this post at pluggd.in.

[cLosing nOte]
I found this interesting piece on the About Us page.

"Funding : We are a privately held company where all the investment in terms of money, time and effort has been made by the founders themselves (infact this is being written by us). For us, business (inasra) is personal and not just a profit making machine for shareholders (profit is a pertinent factor, but not at the cost of ethics). So we will be a privately held company in the near future too."