Cleartrip takes international credit cards just fine - IF they have been registered for Verified by Visa or Mastercard Securecode (where you are taken to your bank's website and have to enter a password before the transaction is allowed).
And you can book both flights and trains on cleartrip. Flights are worth it far more than trains except for two airports on short distance trips - HYD and BLR. The airports in both these cities are quite far from the city (~ 2 hours sometimes) so you would end up spending far more time commuting to / from the airport than you would spend time on the plane.
Rule of thumb - if the journey is 4..6 hours by a daytime train or 9-12 hours by an overnight train, take the train. Else, fly.
Originally Posted by
jbalmuth
I strongly advise mixing and matching ---- i.e. one-way flights for the lengthier distances, trains for the shorter trips. My favorite airline in India is Kingfisher, and they offer one-ways from Mumbai to Ahmedabad for $55 all in, as an example. Regarding advance train planning from overseas, I strongly recommend
http://www.cleartrip.com/. I've successfully reserved, purchased and refunded train e-tickets at
http://www.irctc.co.in/, and recommend it highly. [none of my credit cards seemed to work successfully at cleartrip.]
One important caveat ---- while Kingfisher, a private India airline, is generally vastly superior in airport and inflight service to anything available in the U.S., Indian trains are not to everyone's liking. While Kingfisher has personnel awaiting your arrival outside the terminals, escorts to check-in and through security, inflight service that includes tasty hot meals on even the shortest of flights, and personnel at baggage retrieval anxious to be of help, Indian trains typically offer very little of this kind of customer service hand-holding. If you're likely to be at all squeamish about very crowded, and sometimes quite dirty, train stations, I'd emphasize the planes over the trains....