IRCTC, India’s largest e-ticketing website, is soon going to offer a COD option for travellers to buy railway tickets. According to a recent report by Mint, the COD service that IRCTC wants to bring will be made available through a partnership with Noida based BookMyTrain.com and is expected to go live in a month or so.
This new service is basically targeted at the people living in the rural areas, and for those who still shy away from using credit/debit cards and other means of online payments. In short it will also be a big time help for the travellers who pay commission to agents for booking their train tickets online and thus will cut down the role of agents. Adding on it will also cut down the high transaction failure rate.
Though travel sites like Makemytrip, Cleartrip and Yatra also provide online booking of tickets but none of them have made option of COD available. IRCTC will be the first one to bring in this new concept.
Reports said, the CoD services will be launched in 200 cities on pilot basis, and charges will be levied respectively based on ticket class categories, for the delivery of each Sleeper Class ticket Rs 40 will be charged, and Rs 60 will be charged for an AC class ticket.And customer has to book train ticket 5 days before commencement of train journey.
An official said, the CoD service launch for online train ticket bookings comes at backdrop of to increase passenger’s engagement to make bookings through irctc online portal than traditional way of booking train tickets by standing in queues at stations ticket counter. And also, to let customers to engage in its online booking services who are reluctant to use available online payment services (credit/debit card or net banking facility) available for booking ticket through the website.
How to Book Tickets using Cash on Delivery Option?
The Cash on Delivery facility is only available through IRCTC’s authorized partner website BookMyTrain.com – The facility is also available on their mobile app.
Once you go through the entire ticket booking process, you will need to choose “Cash on Delivery” option.
Anduril Technologies will be responsible for the delivery of tickets, cash management and cancellations of tickets booked on BookMyTrain.com.
IRCTC already sells close to 5 lakh tickets a day, however offering tickets on cash on delivery may not only reduce number of failed transactions, but also witness steep increase in the number of bookings that happen online. Currently, 42 percent people use net banking, 24% use Debit/Credit cards and rest of them use other means like prepaid cash cards to book tickets online through official IRCTC website.
It is great to see IRCTC taking steps to ensure that it becomes easy for train travelers to book tickets. Last year they overhauled their entire infrastructure and increased their capacity of booking tickets from 2000 tickets to 7200 tickets a minute.
Anduril Technologies through their website and their App - BookMyTrain.com is authorised for providing CoD services.
This is another attempt to move people away from the ticket counters and decongest the booking windows, the official said.