I personally didn’t like the support of travel edge portal. Cancellation, altering dates, splitting PNR everything has to be done with Airline and cancellation is also tough and has to be coordinated with both travel edge and Airlines. Travel edge is better only for people who’re assured about their travel journey. MMT offers some Add ons with their MMT black even though they charge some convenience fees.
I have recently gone through all of these and found booking is hassle free. And Yatra I do accept we get 10X points but we do have fare difference of 800-1000 on domestic flight journey.
With MMT black benefits we can see the price difference on screenshots.
I just checked your route prices. To me, both MMT and Yatra show exact same pricing even when I reach payment gateway. Even from my experience, I have always seen that the prices across the various platforms (MMT, Yatra, Cleartrip, Agoda, etc.) are more or less same. What differs between them are the bank offers, convenience fees, add-on charges, etc.
I also did a preliminary research on MMTBlack and found out that the rewards you are showing are for members who do a minimum MMTBlack spend of INR 2 Lakhs. This spend is calculated as 50% of the booking amount of flights and 100% of the booking amount of hotels, holiday packages, and experiences. If I take a 50-50 spend on flights and hotel bookings, it would roughly amount to INR 3 Lakhs worth of transactions in an year. And if I would have to spend INR 3 Lakhs per annum, I surely can get higher benefits by switching between platforms while booking.
Being MMTBlack member even at lower levels is just an added bonus but I have mixed feelings about combining MMTBlack and MMT Vouchers because:
1. First of all, MMT prices for hotels almost always are way higher if you remove the coupons from them. And if you apply coupons, you can't use gift cards.
Eg. 1 During one of my recent trips, the hotel at MMT was 20k with coupons and 29k without coupons. On agoda, it was 19k and it also provided me a cashback of 4k after 4 months. All the terms and conditions were same.
eg. 2 In another trip, MMT (with coupons applied) had similar rates to that of travel edge (no coupon applied). So went with travel edge.
There might be cases where MMT hotel prices are better and in that case I would use MMT.
2. For flights, as I have said above, in my experience I have always seen the prices across various platforms to be consistent. The only added benefit is that MMT does show flexi fares on indigo.
To sum it up, I would personally still see each and every booking separately and book from the platform which offers me the best deal and terms. If it is MMT, be it. But from my analysis I wouldn't actively book via MMT because of MMTBlack and to reach its milestones. MMTBlack will be just an added benefit if I book via MMT.
I'll do some more research on MMTBlack and share details.
Meanwhile, do you know what happened to MMTDoubleBlack? It was really a good program with free flight cancellations, etc.
