photo © 2009 Umang Dutt | more info(via: Wylio)As I write this post, I’m on board 6221 Chennai Express (or Kaveri Express, as it was announced at the station), enroute Chennai from Bangalore. Due to a foreseen inter-city rush between Chennai and Bangalore, just after Diwali, a major Indian festival, I had several wait-listed options for my round trip travel. However, none of them were moving or coming close to a confirmed travel ticket. Finally, in between the festivities I stole some time and managed to book a confirmed Tatkal ticket a mere 48 hours before the journey by paying a premium.
Tripping on Indian Railways is joyous, but predicting the upward movement of your wait-listed ticket towards confirmation is a black-art. I have been told that smart travel agents can predict the movement patterns to a fair degree of accuracy; whether a certain ticket booked 60 days ago shall become a confirmed travel document or not. So much so, they seem to possess a magical insight to predict when an “extra” coach would be added as to move all the wait-listed en-mass to a confirmed status. Hurrah!
Prediction of tickets is just one aspect, I’m higlighting. There are a lot of problems around railway travel that can be solved by using technology at it’s advantage–I’m not talking selling railway tickets on the web, that’s a much easier ‘fish to fry’.
photo © 2009 Lamarr Blocker | more info(via: Wylio)Replace the word railway with air and you can gauge how entrepreneurs solved interesting problems using technology and the internet in the last 15 years for air travel industry.
Do you see what I’m seeing? A 100 crore business around the business of travel in the railways. There are a lot of ideas and a lot of problems to be solved. Statisticizing the well known numbers of IRCTC transactions is not one of them but predicting the sales volume maybe one! Are you passionate about travel? Do you love technology? Come talk to us at The Morpheus, we’ll get you started up.
Due to a foreseen inter-city rush between Chennai and Bangalore just after Diwali, a major Indian festival, I had several wait-listed options for travel for my round trip lasting no less than 24 hours. However, none of them were moving or coming close to a confirmed travel ticket. Finally, in between the festivities I stole some time and managed to book a confirmed Tatkal ticket 48 hours before the journey by paying a premium.
Tripping on Indian Railways is a dream, but predicting the upward movement of your wait-listed ticket towards confirmation is a black-art. I have been told that smart travel agent can predict the movement patterns to a fair degree of accuracy whether a certain ticket booked 60 days ago shall become a confirmed travel document or not. So much so, they seem to possess a magical insight to predict when an “extra” coach would be added as to move all the wait-listed en-mass to a confirmed status. Hurrah!
Prediction of tickets is just one aspect, I’m higlighting, there are a lot of problems around railway travel can be solved by using technology at it’s advantage–I’m not talking selling railway tickets on the web, that’s a much easier ‘fish to fry’.
Replace the word railway with airlines and I see how entrepreneurs solved interesting problems using technology and the internet in the last 15 years.
Do you see what I’m seeing? A 100 crore business around the business of travel in the railways. There are a lot of ideas and a lot of problems to be solved. Statisticiazing the number of IRCTC transactions is not one of them but predicting the sales volume maybe one!
tightened. If you know the alleys of “dark-web”, there are scores of sites who do a hedge between adsense / adwords for a 2-3% margin on incoming vs. outgoing clicks. Most of them rely on a mash-up of content sourced through various means.