Online reservation by Indian Railways

It was not long ago that Indian Railways started online reservation of railway tickets. Earlier booking a ticket was a tedious chore. You had to stand in the queue for hours and it was not easy to know whether there is ticket available or not! All that changed with the arrival of online reservation.

Unfortunately, the online reservation service has its own evils. First, you end up paying a lot of “transaction charge”, “service charge” and “reservation charge” for your ticket. Here is an example,

Suppose you try to book a ticket from Trivandrum to Ernakulam. Ticket price is Rs. 110.  On top of it there is something called “reservation charges” which is Rs. 20.  Now on top of it there is a Rs.15 service charge!  And then add Rs.10 as “bank transfer fee” and an additional service charge of Rs. 1 !!!  So the total now comes out to be Rs.156.  That means you end paying 40% extra for using the online reservation facility.

Remember, Railways is earning a lot through advertisements on its Web page. In fact, it is very difficult to find the login fields among all the ads on the home page as you can see below.  Interestingly irctc.co.in has an Alexa rank of about 2000! So it is an advertising gold mine!

IRCTC screenshot

Now the most funny part of the online reservation site is something called the Shubh Yathra. It is similar to a “frequent flyer” programme. But unfortunately it applies only to upper class travel (even 3 tier AC is excluded!!) and there is an annual fee of Rs. 500! Look at the following equation to see what you get,

Assume you get Shubh Yathra membership card for Rs. 500. Now you get points only for your own personal tickets. Assume that you spend Rs. 10,000 for tickets (excluding family members). That means you earn 4*10,000/100 = 400 points. This translates to a bonus of Rs. 400.  Now remember you have already paid Rs. 500 as subscription fee. So the net profit out of Shubh Yathra for you is = (-100 rupees).  Aaha, you are paying them money ?  Funny indeed!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 7:10 am and is filed under Internet, Life, Opinion. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Online reservation by Indian Railways”

  • 1
    Sujith Philip
    June 4th, 2007 17:56

    hey,

    Thanks for the math…I fell for their Shubh Yathra thing.
    i think I gave them a lot of money by now :-)

    Sujith

  • 2
    Nirmal
    June 6th, 2007 16:32

    Agreed with you Jayson, for small amounts the online booking will be costly. This will be effective only for booking amouts greater than 500.

  • 3
    V Sridhar
    June 7th, 2007 16:42

    Well,

    a) Use a CC for amounts below 500 (since the 1.8% works out cheaper than Rs 10

    b) Use the e-Ticket rather than the i-Ticket : (or is that vice versa)
    so that a printout is all you need. That saves on courier charges

    c) The booking charges have fallen down sharply recently - so that should make for good tidings

    d) The best part I like is - it being open till 11 PM and early mornings, not having to travel to a booking counter. Now with family also knowing how to do this booking - I don’t have to be pulled out for something urgent.

    e) Rope in your CC reward points - and you get money back

    f) As for Frequent Flier (or Train Ride), even IA/AI have a similar botched up rewards program where they want you to register by paying 1000 or so. :-)

    g) Reservation Charges - are applicable even if you book from Railway Reservation Counter.

    h) And most railway reservation counters accept only cash - and have only one or two counters where CC’s are picked up.

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