Cleartrip’s co-founder Hrush Bhatt is a creative genius that has pioneered many firsts in the Indian Online Travel market

Looking to plan your next vacation soon? Think of travel websites that you shall browse through before picking that perfect flight/hotel. Cleartrip is but of course one of the top names that strikethrough!
Especially known for its exclusive partnerships with specific countries and sectors, and also for great cash-saving deals, Cleartrip enjoys a loyal customer base. However, today Inventiva shall bring forward the man behind this magnanimous entity – the supremely talented, Mr Hrush Bhatt.
Mr Bhatt is the co-founder of Cleartrip Pvt Ltd. and the Director of Product and Strategy at the company.
Academically backed with a B.A degree in Economics and History from the Lawrence University, Wisconsin, he went on to serve as a lead designer at PLEXUS technologies early on in his career.
There, he also developed the company’s e-commerce strategies and acted as a lead consultant for Indiatimes.com. These in ways prepared him for what was to come at Cleartrip.
Post that (1999) Mr Bhatt started a venture called the Paper Plane as a co-founder. Paper Plane was a consulting company for helping with strategies and design for online businesses.
It was in 2006, that Bhatt along with Matthew Spacie and Stuart Crighton founded their baby, Cleartrip. Cleartrip was started as an online aggregator of hotels and flights.
They realized a gap in the Indian travel industry at the time, with an apparent need to make travelling and travel bookings much simpler. To tap into this opportunity, the founders decided to build an online platform that would collect and provide all flight, train, hotel options at one single place.
Cleartrip is headquartered in Mumbai and Dubai with offices all around India, Egypt, UAE and Saudi Arabia. In an industry as competitive as this and with minimal margins, Cleartrip continues to grow and sustain.
It is in fact, one of the very few pivotal names of this humungous scale in the industry. Cleartrip’s gross bookings equal to around 1.4 billion dollars with revenues of around 110 million dollars.
What’s more? The company is growing by 40% annually in MENA as more and more tourists are booking online as opposed to offline.
The founders and the company at large have been awarded formal recognition of great significance. More recent ones being, that of a CX visionary and as the Best Mobile App for Travel (2017). They were also awarded for excellence in Travel Blogging (2018).
Bhatt handles strategy planning and analysis at Cleartrip currently. However, his most overpowering achievements lie in being a pioneer of the many firsts in the industry.
Specifically to an Indian market, he brought about new initiatives in the world of travel that had not been witnessed before. For instance, the first online air-ticket auctions in India were done by Bhatt and his team. He also made Cleartrip the first Indian travel website with GDS integrations for flight bookings.
When not at work Bhatt loves to read. He started Cleartrip at a difficult phase of frustration and faced his own challenges in the initial days. However, he fought through them miraculously to build a successful portal.
Bhatt doesn’t believe in looking back and has no regrets.
He says “Entrepreneurship has changed me. I have matured from being a lone designer to becoming someone who works exclusively with teams across multiple disciplines. You cannot achieve anything significant in life by yourself; you always need great people around to help you.”