Freecharge, the Snapdeal-owned payment platform has announced a partnership with ClearTrip to provide a less than 10 second checkout option. The users can easily fast-forward their payment and book flight tickets, train tickets and make hotel reservations using FreeCharge Wallet.
FreeCharge has made its mark across 15 varying sectors, starting from Recharge and Bill Payments. This is the first time the company has forayed into the travel space, with this partnership. The COO, Govind Rajan talks about the partnerships saying that,
Cleartrip has transformed the habit of consumers online travel bookings by being a one-stop shop for all their needs. With this tie-up, Freecharge will take this experience a step further, providing consumers with a means to complete their transactions on the-the-go, at a lightning speed. We are moving towards building an ecosystem for merchants to make consumers’ daily payments frictionless and convenient.
Post Snapdeal acquisition, FreeCharge launched its digital wallet and has since then been hard at work to partner with multiple companies to boost transactions via their platform. Since the launch, the wallet has thus crossed 1 Million transactions and aims to reach 7 Million by the year end.
Clear trip CMO Subramanya Sharma says,
Cleartrip is synonymous with creating simple travel experiences, supported by a market-leading approach to technology. A step in that direction is our association with FreeCharge, a partner which has a similar philosophy in the payment space. We’re confident that this will extend the comprehensiveness of our platform and help Cleartrip customers transact with the payment instrument of their choice.
Freecharge is finally trying to expand and take the fight back to its biggest competitor in digital payments, Paytm. The Alibaba-backed e-commerce giant is expanding swiftly. After initially starting with recharge and bill payments, PayTM had expanded to unimaginable verticals including – Ecommerce, gold loans, movie tickets, even school fee payments and much more. Recently, a pop-up on the PayTM application championed the fact that the company is also entering in the travel space.
In lieu of offering the PayTM wallet services to travel service platform(which it already does), the company wants to bring the ease of booking domestic flights(at first!?) to their own application. The company which has Zillions of dollars invested into the platform, wants to be the one-stop shop for users to digitally pay for every single thing they can imagine.
FreeCharge on its end, is playing a catch up game. More recently, the company launched a virtual plastic Go Card, thus enabling ubiquitous online shopping. Though whether this was a successful move or not, is yet to be figured out. According to the company, customers are actively using it on e-commerce platforms to pay for movie tickets, book event tickets, and commute by cabs. But, will it be enough to fight the digital kingdom that PayTM is building.
This Cleartrip tie up is interesting due to a second angle as well — Snapdeal just recently launched flight ticket bookings on its Android app after all.
ClearTrip, the travel aggregator on the other hand is providing a dedicated and simple consumer website, a robust mobile app, and a ClearTrip for Business option. The company recently has also released a reward-point system on their platform.
