How many times has it happened to you that you have visited IRCTC site to book the tickets only to find that the train you want is completely booked and has a waitlist. Even then, you spend considerable amount of time thinking whether you should still try you luck with waitlisted tickets.
This is quite a frequent phenomenon with train travelers.
Now, an Indian startup may be able to help you with making that decision of “Whether to book waitlisted train tickets or not”.
Trainman.in, a site created by a IIT Roorkee graduate, Amir Mohammad has come up with a solution that predicts availability and confirmation chances of your waitlisted ticket.
The barebones site allows you to search for the trains that you need and gives you out in percentage terms the chances of you getting the booking for a particular train.
We did a little test and found it quite interesting. We searched for tickets from Pune to Hyderabad and it gave us 4 different train options. One of the trains was at “Waitlist 1” and other was at “Waitlist 11”. Generally, one would think that WL1 would have a much higher chance of getting confirmation compared to WL11, but trainman predicted that train with “WL11” has a 67.31 percent change of getting confirmed as compared to “WL1”, which only had 49 percent chance of getting confirmed.
Here is the screenshot.
If the prediction percentages are right, it can become a invaluable tool for train travelers to take the right and informed decision while booking tickets.
Trainman site is currently barebones – Just a simple form to search and a table that shows you the confirmation chances. But seems to be doing the chances of prediction quite well!
How does Trainman predict the chances of confirmation?
Trainman does it scientifically and algorithmically. Here is their explanation:
Trainman gives you confirmation chances of an already booked ticket by using scientific prediction. In general, it is based on simply mimicking the human way of predicting things i.e. learn from past experiences and apply those learnings to the present context. Train seat confirmation prediction is no different.
Trainman keeps on learning from current trends in train ticket bookings and the ups and downs in ticket confirmation scenarios and tries to fit it to a mathematical form, which it reuses at the time of prediction.
Yes, it is as simple as that!
So, next time you are in a fix whether you should book a train ticket that has a waitlist status, make sure you head over to Trainman and get some advice!
Give it a spin and let us know how you find it!
The real question is how accurate is the prediction?
http://confirmtkt.com does the same thing but its algorithm is much more efficient.