Railway is the cheapest mode of travel from one distant place to another. To understand the reason for this, let’s consider an example car journey from Mumbai to Bengaluru. The price of 1 liter petrol in India is around 95 Rs. The distance between the two cities is 984 kilometers. To reach Mumbai from Bengaluru via a car which gives a mileage of 25 Kmpl, you will have to spend up to 4500 Rs ((985/25) * 95 and extra 250 toll charges). Although you can buy a reserved or unreserved ticket from the station, why spend thousands of Rupees or travel to the station and stand in a queue when you can book your train berth from the comfort of your home with the following mobile Android and iOS applications?
Best train ticket booking apps
IRCTC Rail Connect
Rail Connect has been built and published by IRCTC. To book a ticket with it, you must sign in to it with the login credentials you use to sign in to the IRCTC website. First time users of Rail Connect are prompted to set up a four digit security PIN. Instead of entering the login details again, you will be asked to enter this PIN.
Rail Connect is a feature-rich service that enables you to manage your full journey. You can book, cancel the sleeper, AC class tatkal or general tickets. If you’ve cancelled a journey, you can see the refund status with the application.
Although IRCTC is a great app, it becomes slow when the tatkal booking starts in India. The performance degrades because thousands of users log in the site simultaneously and try to book the emergency ticket.
Paytm
One of the many things you can do with this wallet application is book train tickets. Paytm has a quick book feature and supports voice search. It lets users switch to their local language from English. Some services may charge payment gateway usage fees. Paytm doesn’t do so. Other features of this app are as follows:
Running status: Although trains run on time, there may be unforeseen circumstances due to which a train is delayed. You can easily find this out by tapping on the “Running status” option of Paytm.
Calendar: To find out the days on which a train runs between two stations, tap on the Calendar option.
PNR check: If your berth status is not “confirmed”, you must check the PNR status every day, half an hour or 15 minutes to see if railways has allocated you a seat. You don’t have to use any third-party service to do so as Paytm has a PNR checker function built in.
Order food: If you’re not carrying your meal, you can order it online with Paytm.
ConfirmTkt
In 2014, ConfirmTkt made trip planning easier for the users by introducing “confirmation probability”. This feature shows the chances of allocation of berth in percentage format to the users who want to book a waiting list ticket.
A few years later, the founders of ConfirmTkt partnered with IRCTC to let users book train tickets with their platform. Like Paytm, this application has a wallet. To save time, you can add money to the wallet before using the booking function.
IRCTC will charge up to 75% of the price of the ticket as cancellation charges if you cancel a confirmed train seat with their application. The reason why ConfirmTkt is a great alternative to it is that it provides a feature called “FCF” through which you can get full refund on cancellations. Another interesting feature of this app is it will refund money instantly in case you cancel a train ticket. IRCTC transfers the money within 2 to 3 working days.
Amazon Pay
Amazon allows users to book train tickets online from its “Pay” section. I have used Amazon on a few occasions. I found the data confusing. Amazon doesn’t refresh the current berth availability status in real-time. You must click on the refresh icon to see the current “waiting list” status. As Amazon has developed its own payment system, it doesn’t charge users any extra fee for booking a berth in a train.
IXIGO
IXIGO is a popular app among travelers. It is fast and has many filters as on the official IRCTC website. When you click on its buttons or choose filters, it submits the form and displays the data instantly. This is the reason why I like IXIGO. The app also has a toggle option to show only those trains in which a seat is available. If you’re in a hurry, you can tap this option. Apart from good experience, another reason to use IXIGO is that if you book a ticket with it, you will get gift vouchers worth Rs 3500.
MakeMyTrip
MakeMyTrip is a IRCTC partnered service which claims to be the best travel related/niche website in India. Like other applications we’ve shared above, it has partnered with IRCTC.
MakeMyTrip has the most impressive interface among the apps I’ve shared above. When you select an item from the drop-down list or fill out a field, it will automatically move the mouse pointer to the next incomplete field. This saves the user’s time.
MakeMyTrip is one of the few services that offers discounts/cashbacks on booking a train ticket. Some of the other transport facilities supported by MakeMyTrip are as follows:
- Bus, cab.
- Flights, chartered flights.
