The co-founder and CEO of Cleartrip talks about staying focussed on consumers and products in the highly competitive sector of online travel aggregators
Steve Jobs is an icon for many entrepreneurs. We are fascinated by him,” says Stuart Crighton, 49, co-founder and CEO of Cleartrip, alluding to the posters of global entrepreneurs and their famous one-liners that plaster the walls of Cleartrip’s Bengaluru office. Crighton had co-founded the company in 2006 with Hrush Bhatt and Matthew Spacie.
With Goibibo being bought over by Makemytrip in 2016 and Yatra in the final stages of being acquired by Nasdaq-listed Ebix, the online travel aggregation space in India has seen a fair bit of churn. Cleartrip, India’s second largest online travel aggregator, has a 17-19 percent market share, and ended FY19 with an unaudited revenue of $100 million, 50 percent of which came from India.
Crighton speaks to Forbes India about the company’s journey, and how it is helping Cleartrip move into new markets. Edited excerpts:
Q How closely do you relate to the ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’ ideology of Jobs?
I would like to say I do. We’ve made our fair share of mistakes that have impacted us. We have tried to be honest and transparent, and help our customers solve problems. That has been the DNA of Cleartrip. We are simple in our approach, and thoughtful in the kind of products we go after. We wanted people to sample our products and give us feedback rather than tell everyone how good they were. So, philosophically, not talking much and working silently seemed to have worked. And over the last 12-13 years, we’ve been fairly true to that.
Q It has been more than 13 years for Cleartrip. How do you see India?
Anybody who has been around in India, specifically for that long, deserves a pat on the back. It’s been a roller-coaster ride. Not only in the travel sector, but in many other digital industries, too, you’ve seen ups and downs. But it has been a remarkable journey for us. Because of India we were able to enter other markets, and hopefully provide a similar level of expertise and service. But the genesis of that is here: We learnt our craft here, our DNA is from here, a big part of the team remains here, the engineering hub is here.
It’s been a long journey, but it feels like it happened only yesterday. India has that remarkable capability to throw pixie dust at you, and you wake up and go ‘wow that kind of happened quite quickly’.
(This story appears in the 13 September, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)