Did you know that at an average about 1 in 3 transactions on IRCTC meet failure while booking tickets online. The success percentage has improved over past few years, however, failed transactions stillĀ remain a major issue. And the major reason for failed transactions are online payment issues.
Looks like IRCTC will soon be starting to offer Cash on Delivery for online tickets bookings, that should drastically reduce the percentage of failed transactions. Livemint reported this quoting 2 people who are close to this development.
The report states that CoD option for tickets will be made available through partnership with BookMyTrain.com. The service is expected to go live in next four to six weeks.
While Bookmytrain.com is currently not operational, the placeholder put up on their site clearly points to the fact that this news may be quite true.
We tried to dig more on bookmytrain.com domain and the domain has been booked by Anurag Bajpai under the organization, Anduril Technologies Pvt Ltd.
Anduril Technologies is a privately held Noida-based start up incubated under Amity Innovation Incubator. People at Anduril are primarily technocrats with experience in open source technologies.
Prima Facie, it seems that IRCTC has forged a partnership with them and Anduril will be responsible for the delivery of tickets, cash management and cancellations. The Mint report also quotes that this cash on delivery service will be initially made available in 100 cities across India.
Offering tickets on cash on delivery may not only reduce number of failed transactions, but also increase the number of bookings that happen online. Currently, 42 percent people use net banking, 24% use Debit/Credit cards and rest of them use other means like prepaid cash cards to book tickets online.
However, there are still millions of users who cannot do it as they donāt have any means to pay for tickets. Cash on Delivery will help these users tremendously.
On the other hand, the role of travel agents will be diminished, because normal users will not need them anymore. Even IRCTC has taken many steps in recent times to ensure that agents donāt take advantage of the system and introducing CoD will render train ticket booking agents redundant.
IRCTC has undergone a sea change in recent times ā They recently launched next-gen ticketing platform that increased their capacity of booking tickets from 2000 tickets to 7200 tickets a minute. Over past couple of years, they have introduced many new features that include E-Wallet for payments, light-weight website version to facilitate Tatkal bookings and mobile app on Windows 8 platform.
[…] had reported about this back in August, where we had said found that IRCTC has partnered with BookMyTrain.com, a website owned and managed […]
If COD is implemented it will make easier for the hoarders to block more tickets, they have been doing it through the online payment. The problem is not at IRCTC, increasing the number of tickets per minute will not solve the problem, the real problem is of demand and supply. Agents use automated systems to book the tickets, so a normal travelers is not able to book the tickets. The real solution is to stop the tickets hoarding by the travel agents, they block the whole train seats 60 days in advance. They do it because the cancellation charges are low and the premium they charge from customers is very high. If the railways really want to solve the train booking system.
1. Only travelers mobile phone should be used for booking and he should carry the mobile while traveling to confirm the identity of the traveler, ID cards are a easy way for travel agents to provide fake ids to their customers.
2. Impose very high cancellation charges, recently railways started premium trains where cancellation was not allowed, tickers could be booked easily on the train ( IRCTC efficiency not required to implement this )
3. There are more than 10 quotas under which the seats are booked in trains, less than 50% seats are only available to general public, these quotas seats should be released to general public before 24 hours departure of train, so that general public can book the tickets. Currently quota seats go vacant if they enough wait list tickets have not been booked by general public.
4. Increasing the capacity of the trains is one the main solution to this problem, flatform length should be increased to add more coaches to the trains, if platform length can not be increased then if the train stops at station for 10 minutes, then first 24 coaches can be stop at the platform for 5 min and then the train moves forward and rest 24 coaches can come to the platform. This way seats capacity can be doubled.( right not maximum coaches in a train are 24)
Rakesh – Well thought out comment. And after reading this, I can say that IRCTC needs to guard against this. Lets see how things pan out, otherwise CoD may become Agent’s paradise and make things easy for them..