Indian Railways - Epicenter of Indian Online Travel Industry Revolution
In the past year, online travel industry faced a lot of challenges globally but amidst all this the best thing that has happened to the Indian online travel industry was the opening of railways reservation APIs by Indian Railways. Currently, OTA (online travel agency) business in India is expected to be approx. $800 million and depends largely on air travel related transactions. Till now, Indian Rail Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) was the only provider for online train ticket bookings in India but with the Railways opening its inventory for private players this space is ripe for some huge changes this year.
Why this move by Indian Railways is noteworthy?
- Number of airports in India is around 100 where as number of train stations are around 7000 and the number of passengers traveling by train far exceeds the number of passengers travelling by flight. Even then most of the sites in India are still designed around air travel; but this move by IRCTC will soon change this.
- In November 2008, Indian Railways website successfully booked Rs 3.7 Billion ($74.2mn) worth of e-transactions and with this move this pie is available for others as well.
I believe this will lead to a lot of usability innovation by various travel websites in India and there have been clear cut signals coming from various players in the past 3-4 months to uphold this fact.
Thomas Cook & ClearTrip announced the facilitation of online booking of train tickets in July 2008 and Sep 2008 respectively and yet many more are expected to join the party. (Provided Railways ease the entry restriction criteria and provides the permission to use the APIs).
- Thomas Cook – became the first travel website to integrate with Indian Railways to provide train ticket bookings online using Railways APIs. They have done a good job and have made the process of booking tickets easier as compared to Railways own website.
- ClearTrip – cleartrip.com soon joined Thomas Cook and integrated with Indian Railways and along the way it simplified the whole process of online booking than what Indian Railways site offered. Users can see availability of multiple dates together and an availability calendar which we all are used to seeing on many international travel websites like Expedia, Orbitz etc. In my experience, using ClearTrip can save you around 15-20 minutes per transaction where you need to check routes and availability. I would like to classify this as the first wave of usability innovation and expect ClearTrip to maintain its lead in the coming phases.
- makemytrip.com – Another big player in the Indian Online travel industry and expected to soon compete in this space. Makemytrip.com haven’t launched the online railway booking facility yet but the ‘Coming Soon’ page on their website calls for ideas from the users and I think it is a great idea and a good approach to go about collecting ‘User Generated Requirements’. Train booking can sometimes be a very complicated process with options like break journey, various types of concessions and quota availability in Indian railways.
- 90di – 90di (expanded to read 90 degree internet) -‘Simple Search for Complex Travel’- also deserves a mention since we are talking about innovation (though they are not using Railways APIs yet and their solution is slightly different). They launched natural language search for travel needs in Aug 2008 and added more features in Oct 2008. They seem to be doing a great job on interpreting natural queries and thus making the train booking process much simpler. Their filters deserve a special mention; for e.g: by having a carrier name in the query automatically filters the results for that carrier. (Check out here). Below are some of the examples of the travel queries which they interpret from their website -
With Indian Railways opening up their APIs, one missing link in the Indian travel eco-system is available now and many more players are expected to provide integrated Train + Flight search functionality which 90di already has on their site but currently without the use of Railways API.
We will see many more sites offering similar functionality this year where you can book Flight, Train, Bus, Cabs and Hotel all together in one single transaction.For now it looks like the Indian Railways APIs are too strict for start-ups which can put a damper on an end to end innovation but start-ups like 90di has a work around for that and are redirecting users to Railways authorized sites for final payment transaction but having successfully offered natural language search and integrated Train + Flight search. I believe such revolutions may very well spark on the interest of the big players (like Expedia, Travelocity, ClearTrip etc.) in start ups who can innovate in this space, which will be good for the industry as a whole.
I am even more excited by the mention of 'e-auction of passanger tickets' in the status repot for IT projects by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS -the IT wing of the Indian Railways). If railways provides APIs for e-auction as well, there will be a lot of changes which can be expected here and this will definitely make it an interesting space to watch out for in the future.
Trivia - A little known fact about 90di is that it was started by 3 ex-Infoscions (2 of them were part of SETLabs). (http://www.90di.com/travel/about/team.html).
Comments
Who says Internet is getting saturated? If we keep our mind and eyes open we can see lot many opportunities opening up almost daily.
With Internet penetration on the rise in developing countries there is a lot of potential for business.
This beautiful example quoted by Rockey Nebhwani is just a tip of the iceberg. Today the whole Indian Travel and Tourism industry is in tatters ...no synergy between any of the services offered be it Trains/Buses/Cabs/Hotels/Tourist Destinations etc.
I see no point as to why Railway kept the ticketing system all by themselves. I hope someday I would be able to browse Railways map/hotels/flights on my handset and book the tickets from the same....still a long way to go...
Certainly a valuable read......keep going
Posted by: anuj rastogi | February 4, 2009 9:48 AM
Very true, this is the tip of iceberg. You can already access and book tickets on mobile.
irctcmobile . blog: indian-railways-goes-mobile
Though I have found the site to be slow, but its the next big change from indian railways.
Posted by: Utkarsh Bansal | February 4, 2009 10:37 AM
Great post! Railways reservation API is a game changer and it opens up a world of possibilities. Indian Govt/Railways have traditionally been slow adopters to technology. It's good to see them opening up. It's high time we modernized our travel industry!
Posted by: Nandu Muralidharan | February 5, 2009 8:20 PM
Nice blog. Nice to see Railways laying the foundation stone for a change in India.
Posted by: Senthilkumar T. | February 6, 2009 6:48 AM
Hey it’s great to know the array of services Indian railways is providing now! These tie-ups are truly exciting. Just imagine the advantage one would have not withstanding the pain of standing in the long queues. By the way what are the ways of making the payments? I was reading somewhere that u can make the payments using pre-paid cards as well? So can we use cards like ItzCash Cards to make payments for railway booking tickets? I would also like to know whether travel portals accept the payments through prepaid cash cards or not?
Posted by: ravi kumar | February 26, 2009 10:27 AM
Hello Ravi Kumar,
I think cash cards are the new wave of India. Yes you can do a variety of transactions through these cash cards. I have been personally using ItzCash Card for Railway Booking and Mobile Recharge and it is indeed very safe and convenient. I would suggest you visit www.itzcash.com to get more information.
Posted by: Vikram | February 27, 2009 9:57 AM
Thanks Vikram for responding to Ravi's comment.
Since I wrote this post, another player Yatra.com entered this space and User experience on Yatra.com is nicely designed and user friendly....Readers can refer the press release @ http://business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=55886&tp=on
and the link for Yatra.com train booking is - http://www.yatra.com/indian-railways/index.html
Posted by: Rockey Nebhwani | March 4, 2009 6:04 AM
Nice, informative post.
Regarding the final "Trivia" comment about 90di.com - all three of them were from SETLabs.
Posted by: Narayan B | March 18, 2009 1:38 PM