Cleartrip accuses EaseMyTrip of copying app feature, EMT hits back

Cleartrip, a global online travel company, has accused rival EaseMyTrip of blatantly copying its 'TravelSafe' section in its app.

The internal team of CT spoke to BestMediaInfo.com about the alleged violation. "TravelSafe is Cleartrip's latest offering, where the brand has curated content around safe travel that can alleviate customer anxiety and stress around travel. (information on quarantine guidelines, airport and airline, rescheduling and cancellation, and airline policies mentioned and timely updated),” Cleartrip said.

Cleartrip claimed that the Travel Checklist section of 'TravelSafe' is a copy-paste of its work, down to the iconography.

According to Cleartrip, all its icons in the guide are custom-designed, in house, and deployed as SVGs. “It would be an unseen and never-heard-before coincidence if another designer in another team, elsewhere, does such a strikingly similar set,” it said.

Ashish Dhruva, VP Cleartrip, said, "In line with our company values, we have spent an incredible amount of time, cost and effort in putting this product together rapidly for our customers and are encouraged by the warm reception to the same. However, we are incredibly disappointed that EaseMyTrip has plagiarised our content, including our mistakes."

Speaking on the accusations, Prashant Pitti, Co-founder of EaseMyTrip, said, "As a responsible brand, we never copy the content, and we take pride that Cleartrip (and others) have copied our content in the past."

Pitti said the content on Cleartrip's blog "Airline guidelines related to Covid-19" is sent by the airlines to all associated travel portals. Hence same typos might exist at multiple websites.

"We regret of not proof-reading content thoroughly, as these are difficult times and airlines also changed their policies multiple times on short notice," said Pitti.

To do some fact-checking in order to not overreact to pure happenstance, Cleartrip said it ran the face mask SVG (its own as well as the one EMT was using) through DiffChecker and found that the two files are 100% identical.

The result convinced Cleartrip that icons are their proprietary and are being brazenly re-used by EaseMyTrip without permission and it plagiarised their ideas.

According to Cleartrip, there can’t be any explanation for its custom-designed SVG finding a 100% code (path) match in the wild.

Pitti said the mentioned icons are purchasable online and Cleartrip may have purchased the icons from the same source and hence both have the same source-code. "We purchased icons from here," Pitti said.

Pitti said that EaseMyTrip.com is busy in refunding cash to customers while Cleartrip’s twitter is flooded with customer complaint about not receiving refunds. "We think it is a strategy to derail customer complaints," Pitti said.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com