With reports of the adani group’s recent acquisition of train ticket booking service Trainman, several media houses wrote that the group is now going to challenge the Railways and its train ticket booking service IRCTC, although this is not true at all.
The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC), in a letter sent to the country’s major stock exchanges Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange (NSE) on Sunday. Clarified that the acquisition of trainmen by any other company will not have any impact. Fintech influencer Ravi Sutanjani also elaborated on micro-blogging website Twitter why the acquisition will make no difference to IRCTC’s ticket booking service.
“In view of newspaper reports regarding their e-ticketing business segment. It is clarified that about 14.5 lakh reserved tickets are booked daily on Indian Railways. Out of which 81% i.e. about 11,74,500 tickets are e-tickets booked through IRCTC.
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According to the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited. They have partnered with several agencies under schemes like B2B, e-governance, B2C etc. for ease of booking tickets, whose agents IRCTC has no competition with. “In addition, B2C firms have been specifically linked with IRCTC’s business so that customers can be given reserved tickets directly from the websites of B2C firms or through mobile apps through IRCTC APIs.
According to IRCTC, Trainman is one of IRCTC’s 32 B2C partners, contributing 0.13 per cent of the total reserved ticketing. And its acquisition by any other agency will not alter the implementation of the existing B2C policy in any way. All integrations and operations will continue to be done only through IRCTC, as is currently happening.
On the other hand, Ravi Sutanjani has explained this in detail in a thread on Twitter.
According to Ravi, the published reports are misleading and have been published without understanding the technical aspects. According to Ravi, Adani Digital Labs recently acquired Trainman (online train booking and information platform). Which has been added to the already existing ‘Adani One’ app.
Ravi further explains, whenever a customer books a train ticket through any app or website. He ultimately has to use IRCTC user ID and password. And in no case do these apps or websites book tickets without IRCTC user ID and password. As soon as the ticket is booked. The customer is also taken directly to the IRCTC page on the app or website being used by them. So, it cannot be that any platform, be it Adani Group, Amazon or MakeMyTrip, competes with IRCTC.
