Mobile railway booking to grow

Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation's e-ticketing site irctc.co.in is adding more operators to its mobile Reservation Services and Mobile PNR alert services.

The e-ticketing site, which has already tied-up with AirTel, Hutch and Reliance, it is now roping in MTNL, iDEA, Tata Indicom and BSNL.

A senior railway official in charge of operations said, "Several operators are in the process of making applications for these services including speech recognition (voice), GPRS & CDMA."

With over 85 per cent of the country's 46 million subscribers with these mobile operators, Indian Railways said it will in early 2005 launch SMS-based booking application under its short code 7245.

The official clarified that mobile reservation services constitute over 10 per cent of e-ticketing in several areas. For instance, the service launched through Hutch recently saw record bookings.

With no agents, franchisees or distributors anywhere, mobile commerce is a growing area for the Railways. The official said that Railways is working with operators to make reservation as user-friendly as possible.

"All we need to do is to get the customer hooked onto the model, then we will see the results." To start with, Indian Railways expects the SMS-based booking application, rather than the voice-based one, to attract customer hits.

In fact, mobile reservation services were instrumental in the e-ticketing site cross several milestones like the one million registered users mark and regularly cross the one lakh ticket sales per month.

Also, anticipating the enhanced access to e-ticketing, Indian Railways has widened the payment options.