Amazon Introduces Flight Bookings in India in Partnership With Cleartrip

Amazon has introduced flight bookings in India. The e-retailer has partnered with Cleartrip for the new service, which can be accessed on the Amazon Pay dashboard in the Amazon app or on the Amazon.in website. The e-retailer seems to be offering a pretty basic flight booking experience at this point and only bookings for the domestic flights are supported. In a bid to entice consumers to use the new feature, Amazon is also providing as much as Rs. 2,000 as Amazon Pay cashback.

The flight bookings on Amazon India seem to have gone live around late Thursday without much fanfare. The e-retailer also doesn't seem to be promoting the new feature on its app or website homepage right now.

As per the FAQs shared on Amazon, the company's involvement in the flight bookings seems to be limited to just providing a space for flight bookings and Cleartrip will handle all the post-booking support for the consumers.

Amazon is touting lowest cancellations fees, cashback rewards, transparent pricing, and easy booking experience as highlights of its flight booking feature. According to Amazon website, the cashback offers will remain available until May 31. The company is offering Rs. 800 to Rs. 2,000 cashback to Prime subscribers and Rs. 400 to Rs. 1,600 cashback to non-Prime Amazon users, depending on the value of the booking.

Amazon has been gradually expanding Amazon Pay functions in India and the company had even added support for peer-to-peer payments in the service recently. Right now, Amazon Pay also offers support for mobile recharges, DTH recharges, and various bill payments. It doesn't look like that Amazon is stopping anytime soon after flight bookings.

"Over the past year, customers have rapidly adopted our payments services such as mobile recharges, utility payments and money transfers," said Shariq Plasticwala, Director, Amazon Pay, in a statement. "We're delighted to add domestic flight bookings enabling customers to do more with their Amazon app and for Prime members to get more value from their membership. We are excited to partner with Cleartrip and share their passion of creating best in class travel experiences."

The rival payment services like Google Pay and Paytm have already dabbled in the travel space with Google's UPI service offering train ticket bookings support and Paytm offering train tickers, flight tickets as well as hotel bookings.