Comments
Imagine a perfect situation — getting to know, while booking a ticket, the probability of the ticket getting confirmed.
Railyatri.in, an app that has modelled itself around providing different services to crores of train users, claims it can tell you with 93 per cent accuracy the number of times a waitlisted train ticket can be confirmed.
“We tracked tickets across two-three years, and are now able to predict 93 per cent of the time whether a ticket will be confirmed or not. The predictive analysis is based on people sharing data with us. We provide train timings, waitlisted status, with an indication of high or low probability of getting a ticket confirmed,” Manish Rathi, co-founder and CEO of Railyatri.in, told BusinessLine .
According to Rathi, their research showed that at the counters, one of the key concerns of people booking a ticket was whether a ticket will get confirmed.
Diversification plans Railyatri.in has been downloaded over 3 million times by users and the company looks to add more services, such as local trains and metros, with the core as railways.
With selling train tickets definitely on the radar, the website plans to start tying up with facilities used by train users, like buses, taxis and budget rooms.
For this, it is open to tying up directly with service providers and other aggregators, if they have good inventory.
The company works on the philosophy of aiming to provide anything that helps passengers make decisions.
“It could be related to a train reaching on time, platform numbers, coach position in a platform, and seat production, among others. We also tell people about news-events that can affect daily commute of trains,” he said.
Railyatri also had another interesting finding: the non-ticket revenue of a long-distance train passenger is more than the train ticket revenue. Passengers spend more on cabs, food, and porters than on the journey itself.
Based on the types of phones long-distance passengers use, or the kind of food they order, AC 3-tier passengers and even some sleeper passengers, could be compared with low budget airline travellers. “Their quality of service expectations do not change – even if they are travelling in sleeper,” said Railyatri.in.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.