IRCTC Booking – You Better Queuing!

If you though that the sluggishness of IRCTC login booking website is only for the morning rush hour sessions, sorry to you… it seems that the stretching is for the entire day. It doesn’t matter what time of the day when you access the website, chances are that you will crack the IIT-JEE more than when you can be able to do the IRCTC booking of the journey ticket.

Even when you are lucky to cross the initial hurdles, you are not guaranteed of your transaction being processed successfully. More than 1.4 crore transactions processed by the website in February were unsuccessful.

You will spend hours booking tickets on irctc.co.in when you could have used the same time in more productive uses. On the other hand, the booking tickets usually never take more than just a few minutes.

The IRCTCL – Indian Railway and Tourism Corporation Limited is the top operator of Indian’s largest commerce website, though the size of operations have little to do with quality of services consumers receive. You can’t help wonder when will there be someone who sits down and make calculations of the several hours that the IRCTC has cost to the economy of India. When that is made, sure it will be one humongous figure.

It would be logical for the company to scale its infrastructure accordingly, given the amount of traffic the website gets, so as to handle the traffic flow. However, Rakesh Kumar Tandon, IRCTC managing director was posed with a question which made him give Economic Times the explanation that with the 7.5 Lakh people dissatisfied each day, increasing the capacity to enable a handling of 15 Lakh concurrent connections would lead to 14.5 Lakh dissatisfied customers.

With that in mind, what Tandon and his company have failed to understand is that customer dissatisfaction is as much as with unavailability if the tickets as with inability to use the website smoothly. The presence of lesser tickets is by no way a justification for slowing down the website to make users literally struggle when getting their tickets.

Any other website offering tickets still depends on IRCTC. What this means is that f the servers of the IRCTC becomes unresponsive, then very little can be done by the other websites. With the friendly interface, I still prefer using Yatra.com, though they still charge a little extra. They are speedier and there are fewer chances of you getting unsuccessful transactions.

On the consumers hand, not only should the number of trains; and its frequency be increased but also the monopoly of IRCTC in online ticketing needs top be intervened.

Sometime in the past, there was news regarding the CRIS-Centre for Railway Information System developing a website which would compete with the IRCTC. There is no news about the progress of the project though. Coming of CRIS is not an alternative, and pop-up infected websites made by them hardly do they offer any confidence.

There have been other websites, such as the indiarailinfo.com which are doing great in the railway data, hence providing a better user experience. CRIC and IRCTC should at least borrow some ideas from such websites.

In the meantime, if you are looking to book a train ticket, you should consider standing in the queue and not going at the reservation at IRCTC- it saves time!

Final Words: “Rajnikanth is faster than Intel Processors, but IRCTC can hang Rajnikanth”