Amazon is making its way towards creating a super app for India, like Paytm. So, Amazon has come around and now launched travel bookings in India. They have been testing the waters for quite some time now. Last year, they had launched flight bookings exclusively for Android app users last year in a closed beta. Now, Amazon Flight booking India, has been launched as a full-fledged service.
Amazon has partnered with Cleartrip for flight bookings. One needs to head to Amazon.in/flights to make a booking. The user interface is very similar to that of Cleartrip and is easy to use.
A feature which Amazon is marketing is that they won’t charge any convenience fee apart from what the airline will charge if you were to cancel the tickets. Other OTAs like MakeMyTrip.com levy a convenience fee of around INR 300 apart from airline fees if you were to cancel flight tickets booked through them.
Flight bookings on Amazon
As an introductory offer, Amazon is offering a one time Amazon Pay cashback to the tune of INR 2,000 till May 31, 2019, when you book flights using the Amazon Flights booking service.
Cashback on flight bookings through Amazon
Though it is simple, to use it does lack options like adding travel insurance or zero cancellation at an additional cost or seat selection while booking tickets for the moment. Hopefully, if this works out for Amazon, they will further tune it in the long run to make more products available, such as hotels and so on. This is also an interesting use case to sell the Amazon Prime membership programme in India, as Prime members get a better discount, and perhaps better facilities when booking with Amazon.
Can someone confirm if we will get 5% Amazon Pay balance on flight bookings if booked using the Amazon Pay ICICI credit card?
Potentially we would get more savings by booking through Amazon:
– No “convenience” fee (even airline charges if we book directly) for either booking or cancellation
– Cashback offers. Though this one is an introductory offer, there may be some offer running at least for medium term
– 5% cashback over and above other cashback through ICICI Amazon card
Will I get 10X reward points if I route it through smartbuy?
It would be interesting if booking flights with ICICI Amazon card can yield further discounts or benefits for the user. Up till now the amazon cc looks like a basic rewards card but this can potentially make it a good basic travel card if they want to do it.