Indian railways is changing – and we hope it is for the better!
We didn’t really have the best of experiences in a recent trip we made to Kanpur.
The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) will be very shortly launching a separate travel portal within its existing www.irctc.co.in that will give travel destinations, hotels and other lodgings, choice of meals – vegetarian or non-vegetarian – mode of travel, car rentals, bus connections with advance bookings etc
The interesting thing is, the internet bookings will take care of everything. For instance, in our recent trip to Kanpur we traveled by the Mumbai-Lucknow Pushpak Express. The train passed throught Bhopal conveniently during dinner time!
So I could have booked a pizza to be delivered at Bhopal station in Madhya Pradesh and I would have got it delivered once the train arrived at the station.
Imagine if the train was 5 hours late, like it was during our journey!
IRCTC Managing Director P.K. Goel said the travel portal is aimed at providing a single window facility to the tourist and traveler anywhere in the world. It is targeting both foreign tourists and Indians on sight seeing and visiting pilgrimage spots.
"The bookings naturally involve the customers’ credit cards and we are aware of the fear of misuse of cards. That is why the travel portal will have a system wherein it will not have the capacity to store information about the credit card or its pin number. This may go a long way in setting to rest apprehensions of customers on the misuse of their credit card," Goel added.
Last October we had blogged about Railways coming up with internet in running trains! Wonder if that would ever happen!
They could aim at getting some more plug points in place in the trains. I faced a queue of around a dozen people just to get 20 minutes to charge my phone at the solitary plug point outside the AC 2 Tier cabin!
Credit: IANS
