Two of India’s leading travel services portals are on the war-path with Travelocity India filing a civil lawsuit against Cleartrip on grounds of data theft by its executives. Rediff reports that the lawsuit was filed in the Bombay High Court, claiming US $37.5 Million in damages from Cleartrip.
The suit was filed last week by online travel agencies Desiya and Travelguru, which were acquired by Travelocity in 2009.
With the exception of this incident, Cleartrip has been doing fairly well in the Indian travel scene, and is among the top sites (in the travel category by unique visitors) as can be seen below according to a comScore report.
The allegations go back to 2009, when Travelocity had filed a FIR against Cleartrip CEO Stuart Crighton and director (hotels and distribution) and former Desiya CEO, Amit Taneja, for illegal procurement of confidential data, hotel database, and knowledge of business processes.
Responding to the news, Cleartrip published an announcement on its blog today stating the following:
Since December 2009, senior executives of Cleartrip have been facing continuous harassment with what we believe is a misconceived and baseless criminal complaint filed by Travelocity. . . We believe this civil suit is vindictive and the figures quoted are completely groundless and something we deny strongly. We can only assume that this has been filed to create additional sensationalism.
According to VCCircle citing the FIR filed by Travelocity, the data theft resulted in a loss to the tune of US $200 Million. It also mentions that the Gurgaon police’s investigations had found Amit Taneja guilty of downloading Desiya’s data on to Cleartrip servers.
The true picture might not be known to anyone apart from those involved, but this pluggd.in post makes me wonder whether there is a difference between sharing knowledge and sharing trade secrets when an employee migrates over from one company to its competitor. Making the announcement a day before the hearing date, could very well be a calculated PR move on Travelocity’s part, as it is now actively being discussed in the media.
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