IRCTC – Easy Way Of Booking Tickets
The ticket booking in Indian railways has come a long way, a few decades ago booking a railway ticket would mean endless queues. With internet the world changed, there was lot of technical invasions and railways also didn’t want to left behind. They first came up with their site www.indianrail.gov.in ,which helped the passengers a big way but they striked gold with their new website www.irctc.co.in.
About IRCTC
IRCTC stands for Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation opts. This was set up in the year 2002 and is a public sector company. This is completely owned by the Ministry of railways and serves almost close to 13 million people on a daily basis. They have been instrumental in managing the catering and tourism services at various stations and have also been helping in promoting a lot of domestic tourism.
Ticket Booking
IRCTC has already become synonymous with booking of tickets. They help in planning and booking tickets for long distance travel as well as for the normal season tickets. Season tickets are generally passes that can be furnished on a monthly or a quarterly basis depending upon the frequency of the travel. Season tickets are by and large used very heavily by Mumbaikars who travel on a daily basis to work.
Services
As discussed earlier, one can book long distance travel through IRCTC. For that all you need to do is log into the IRCTC site, type in the password and username. If you are a first timer on the site, you may need to create a username and password. Once logged in, for booking tickets one needs to click on plan my travel. Plan my travel opens up a new page, where in you need to mention your to and from destination, the date on which the travel is decided and the type of ticket. On IRCTC, you can book tickets via e ticket, I ticket and for Tatkal services. Once all the details are filled in, a list with the name of trains will appear on the screen. Select the train, select the class and click on book depending upon the availability. Payments can be done using debit card, credit card and net banking. Apart from booking, IRCTC also helps in keeping track of the tickets, checking the status of the tickets.
Other services
One can also cancel the tickets via IRCTC; you need not go to the ticket counter for the same. Apart from cancellation, you can also take printout of the ticket if you have booked an e ticket. Other than the services related to tickets one can also claim for refunds via TDR, this generally happens when you are not able to undertake the journey. Also, as said earlier IRCTC also helps you book season ticket. All you need is click on season tickets, on the screen that gets displayed specify the details and make the payment online.
IRCTC, in short has made life really easy for the general populace as they are saved from long queues.