Booking rail tickets online is fast catching up in India. The Railways has recorded a growth of close to 12 per cent in online ticket bookings, compared with a muted growth of below 1 per cent in offline bookings.
The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the online ticket portal for the Railways, booked 15.7 crore e-tickets in 2013-14, up 11.7 per cent growth against over 14 crore online tickets booked in 2012-13.
Offline ticket reservation, which still caters to the bulk of rail passengers, logged bookings of over 46 crore. However, the growth in this segment was a mere 0.9 per cent, according to Indian Railways data. The share of online train bookings has gone up to 47-48 per cent in 2013-14 against 43-44 per cent last year, said Sunil Kumar, Group General Manager-IT, IRCTC, adding that the portal sold tickets worth ₹15,700 crore. The average revenue per ticket is ₹1,000, he added.
“The online booking portal has 3.7 crore registered users, of which 2.4 crore are active,” he said. IRCTC defines active users as those who log into the system every six months and usually book a ticket.