New Year Gift To Train Passengers; Indian Railways Launches Upgraded e-Ticketing Website

Bhubaneswar: In a gift to train passengers ahead of New Year, the Indian Railways on Thursday launched the upgraded e-ticketing website.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal unveiled the new e-ticketing website- www.irctc.co.in and IRCTC Rail Connect Mobile App which are used for booking railway tickets ‘online’.

It is pertinent to mention here that the Indian Railways had launched Next Generation E-Ticketing (NGeT) system in 2014 to provide seamless e-ticketing services through IRCTC.

At present, the 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.

Silent Features Of Upgraded Website:

-The booking of meals, retiring room and hotels integrated and can be directly along with the tickets.

-Predictive entry suggestions using Artificial Intelligence to be given to the passengers when they are entering the stations and other details.

-Simpler checking of the refund status at the user accounts page.

-Regular or favourite journeys can be booked easily by automatically entering relevant details.

-Train search & selection simplified by putting the information on one page to reduce the time used by passengers and enhancing the booking experience.

-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.