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 still 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 don’t 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 don’t take advantage of the system and introducing CoD will render train ticket booking agents redundant.
IRCTC has undergone a sea change in recent times – 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.