IRCTC adds new feature for passengers

The passengers book tickets to travel in Indian Railways most of the times book tickets through the internet ticketing website of IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation).

According to IRCTC, over 83 per cent of the total reserved tickets have had booked tickets through the online website. However the booked tickets on cancellation get refunded after a 48 to 72 hours wait by the passengers who booked through a online medium. Earlier the IRCTC launched a new feature for its website and mobile app in which the users of IRCTC could get an instant refund of their cancelled tickets thus saving a considerable amount of time after the ticket has been cancelled by the passenger. This feature gives financial freedom to the passengers who want to do subsequent booking on the same or the next day without the worry for credit of refunded amount in their banks.

IRCTC’s new feature of instant refund to the IRCTC Website or Mobile App users using IRCTC IPay. The IRCTC has now equipped its payment gateway “I-Pay” with an AutoPay feature.

The users by this feature have to allow for debut to their UPI bank account or other payment instruments which would create a lien on their payment instrument.

The feature also ensure the higher reliability of ticket booking through the pre-authorised mandate as it reduces the user’s time filling in the payment instrument details.

The feature also minimises the refund time for the Tatkal bookings for the transactions that remained waitlisted.

The funds are blocked from the user’s bank account and the debit was raised for the full booking amount only when the ticket gets booked.

The feature is useful in the cases where the ticket does not get booked after the deduction of payment from the passengers bank or the Tatkal waist listed ticket remains wait listed even after the preparation of the chart and the ticket is dropped from charting. Only cancellation charges are recovered from the transactions and the mandate are released.

The only deduction made from the user’s account would be service charge, cancellation charge and payment gateway charges.

IRCTC recently upgraded the user interface of the internet ticketing website of the railways for a smooth booking experience.