It will be launching its new product, SmallWorld, on May 10 at the Arabian Travel Mart in Dubai and what SmallWorld aims to do, according to founder & director, product and strategay, Hrush Bhatt, is offer travellers a new way of searching and planning their trips.

“We want to push the envelope on how people search for travel,” he said. “For the last 15 years, we’ve been searching basically the same way. We want to take a natural approach to search by leveraging all the advances of technology – geo-location, mobile, etc – and offer people a new way of searching.

“Just type in where you want to go and you will find we don’t stop at the usual thousands of destinations. We have indexed 3.2 million unique places.” It has content partnerships with Lonely Planet, Wikipedia and Flickr.

He said the site would offer broader as well as deeper searches eventually. “This is only the building block for what it will eventually become.”

Eventually, he said, users would also be able to search by interests. “It will be another six months before we can do that. The priority is to get everything geographically correct.”

The company demonstrated the product at TEDx in Mumbai this month and comments have been positive so far.

“At the demonstration, people had two things to say – I need this and when can I have it?” said Hrush. “I think we have hit upon an umet need – a single search that takes you from planning to transaction.”

Saying this was the most significant thing he’s ever done since Cleartrip was founded in July 2006, Bhatt said, “SmallWorld will help make the world a smaller place than it is already. It is kind of hard now when planning your trips, the number of sites you have to go to.”

As you search, transaction-related content will then be directed at you, in the same way that Gliider, a product that was reviewed in WIT a couple of weeks ago. 

“Gliider is a cool concept, I like it. It fulfils a similar need although they are out of the browser,” said Hrush. But what Cleartrip has is strong transaction content built up over several years. 

“We have 400,000 search requests a day and that keeps our content fresh,” he said.

He said that travel planning sites like Gliider and NileGuide were obviously aimed at meeting a key unmet demand.

“This will give us a big march over our competitors,” he said.

Expansion plans are still being mulled over as to whether SmallWorld should go local language or go into markets where English is widely spoken.

Featured image credit (world connection in blue) : iStock