Around 20% Of Online Train Ticket Inventory Has Opened Up For Public: RailYatri

Bengaluru: Around 20% of train ticket inventory has opened up for online booking within months of resumption of train services in the northern and southern states, said a top executive of online train tracking and booking platform RailYatri. RailYatri’s online train booking platform is currently seeing around 2,500-3,000 daily bookings, which is around 50% of the demand it had before March. “We have recovered to about 50-55% of the bookings that we used to process before March 2020. This is because only about 15-20% of the trains’ inventory. We used to process around 5,500-6000 daily bookings before March,” Manish Rathi, chief executive, RailYatri said in an interview. It also provides train ticket PNR predictions, similar to other tech startups such as Confirmtkt, Railofy, and IRCTC, which launched a prediction feature on its online ticket booking platform in May 2018. Apart from train bookings, RailYatri also offers bus booking options, but this option is mostly dedicated to users whose train tickets are wait-listed. Mint reported on May 2019 that around 40% of the daily 600,000 train bookings made in India, via both online and offline medium, go directly into a wait-list, as per data sourced from Confirmtkt. Black-marketing of tickets, low capacity on non-premium trains and the rising influence of middlemen in train ticketing are contributing factors to wait-listed tickets.