New Delhi, Jan 1: In what could be described as a New Year gift for passengers, the Railways has upgraded its e-ticketing site by providing one stop solution for the needs of the traveller.
The revamped site managed by the IRCTC, the ticketing arm of Indian Railways, has added user personalization features linked to user login incorporated for the first time ever offering service such as the booking of meals, retiring rooms and hotels has been integrated and can be directly along with the tickets,
IRCTC has undertaken the exercise to enhance the booking experience of the rail users with simplifying the train search and selection by putting the information on one page to reduce the time used by passengers.
Launching the revamped e-ticketing site and IRCTC Rail Connect Mobile App, which are used for booking of Railway tickets ‘online’, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said “The Railways is committed to serving the nation, and constantly working to augment its services to further improve the rail travel experience.”
He said further “This upgraded e-ticketing platform for booking of online railway tickets, will enhance passenger convenience…IRCTC should continue to work towards constantly improving the website and ensure that it is second to none in the world as per the Digital India mission and vision of the Prime Minister.”
Predictive entry suggestions using Artificial Intelligence will be given to the passenger when he is entering the station. This will greatly reduce the hassle in searching for platforms and also save time in ticket booking, according to the Railways.
The railway customer has been focused on the design of this new world class website for booking of rail tickets.
The upgraded site enables simpler checking of the refund status at the user accounts page. Earlier this feature was not easily accessible.
‘Regular’ or ‘Favorite’ journeys can be booked easily by automatically entering relevant details.
The added features include all information on one page – availability for all class are displayed along with respective fares for all trains. Simply scroll the page and choose to ‘Book’ the desired train and class. Earlier each train seat availability and fares could be seen only after clicking on that train individually.
A ‘Cache system’ has been introduced in the backend to provide availability status. This will avoid delays in loading availabilities.
In case waitlisted tickets, its ‘confirmation probability’ is displayed. Earlier this had to be checked for each waitlist status separately. Availability for other dates can be toggled on the page itself.
Prompts during the booking process for making it easy for even less computer familiar users. This will save his time in wandering on the website for searching the website.
The journey details will be shown also at the payment page. It will prompt the user to check and rectify, if there are any typographical errors. These corrections can only be corrected by visiting a PRS centre.
The website has in-built features for enhancing cyber security by using appropriate captchas.
According to railways, the upgraded and enhanced e-ticketing website ans mobile app aims to provide best in class user experience amongst various other online travel and ticketing websites.
The level of these features will be even more advanced than the ones offered currently by the other ticketing websites. In most websites, the station search entry is still alphabetical, availability status is either not there or old in time.
At present, this e-ticketing website of IRCTC has more than 6 crore active users, using it to book more than 8 Lakhs tickets daily. Around 83% of the total reserved railway tickets are booked through this online system.
Along with this, its capacity will also increase, due to which the pressure of booking in peak hours will not cause crashing of websites. Now, passengers will be able to get more options for payment after ticket booking.