BENGALURU: Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) which manages the railways ticket booking is aiming at reducing the excessive load on their website and ‘rationalise’ the charges levied on business to consumer agents through its revised policy on electronic ticketing, said the company in a press note.
This comes on the backdrop of an ET story around how business to consumer agents like MakeMyTrip, Paytm, Yatra and other companies who allow their consumers book train tickets online are training their guns at IRCTC against the new policy changes.
“IRCTC has made few changes in B2C policy of E-ticketing. Policy changes have also been made to make the charging policy for B2C service providers more rational. It will have no impact on pricing of tickets to public through B2C service providers as they are authorized to charge Rs 20 per ticket for second class and sleeper class and Rs. 40 for AC classes,” said an IRCTC spokesperson.
IRCTC also said that this move would help reduce the excessive load that these B2C agents throw onto IRCTC’s ticket booking website. Against a normal booking to actually searching for a ticket is much below 50, in case of many of such operators it is way above 100. This move could bring it down, they feel.
“Few B2C service providers are making very large number of tickets while others are very low on ticketing but their enquiry load is more,” he said.
Further IRCTC hopes that these charges would help reduce the front loads on startups who can provide a better user experience to consumers while booking tickets.
As per the latest directive from IRCTC, a copy of which was seen by ET, revising charges from a flat fee of Rs 25 lakh, it has been changed to Rs 12 per ticket booked along with additional charges. Plus for every enquiry beyond the look to book ratio of more than 70, IRCTC will levy an additional charge of 25 paise plus taxes as a charge for consuming IRCTC APIs.
