[2Gkashmiri]

why do you have a lottery system?

can you buy an airline ticket at the airport 2 minutes before boarding? yes. does the system accurately track unbooked seats with 100% accuracy? yes. can you "automate" airline ticket booking with an almost 1 click operation? yes. can the millions of airline websites and agents manage simultaneous ticket booking of a single seat so that at no time are two people charged for the same ticket? yes. can they reschedule, do web check in, assign seats, book meals, cancel tickets? yes. can they offer error free painless booking experience without plastering user with stupid captchas or otps? yes.

if yatra.com can do it, irtctc not doing it because they follow some arcane regulations about "security" and not doing things intuitively is why they are shit and the onus is on irctc to provide feature parity with airlines experience. dont blame someone on helping

[sokoloff]

I suspect if you let these tickets become market-priced like airline seats, you wouldn’t have these problems either.

I think the core issue is that the rail operator (gov) for whatever reason wants these last-minute tickets to be available at an artificially low ticket price.

That’s not what airlines are trying to do. Trying to build a system that works with the natural effects of markets is much easier than creating a system that works against market forces.

Look at the Ticketmaster experience for popular concerts and sports tickets. Waiting rooms and bugs and software workarounds/hacks, all because it’s a raffle for tickets being sold below what the free market price would be.

This does not appear to be a primarily technical problem. If these tickets sell out in 10 minutes, creating a better technical solution to let them sell out in 2 minutes isn’t actually improving anything meaningful.

[idiot900]

The artificially low ticket prices are a way to allow India’s poor to travel. Market pricing is more efficient but it does not accommodate their social goals here.

[sokoloff]

Yes, I get that. The reason I brought that up is to point out that the comparison to market-based systems working better is not a valid comparison. And a system that allows people to pay more to "jump the line" is wholly against the social aims of this pricing mechanism.

If you raffle off these tickets to the luckiest fraction of people who want them, many prospective purchasers will end up disappointed. You can shift the mix of how many of them are disappointed by technical glitches versus how many are disappointed by the tickets going to other people, but you're still going to disappoint most of the people who want them.

[2Gkashmiri]

wouldnt keeping a fixed price solve the issue?

>This does not appear to be a primarily technical problem. If these tickets sell out in 10 minutes, creating a better technical solution to let them sell out in 2 minutes isn’t actually improving anything meaningful.

i am sorry i don't understand how is forcing users to buy those tickets in 10 minutes instead of efficient 2 minutes helping anybody?

its not like i can just buy PNRs like i can do on airlines to inflate the demand. i have to buy a ticket now, if its available, i pay and thats it. why do you need complications. its not like i could sell my ticket or transfer or whatever.

where does ticketmaster come in? that is a for profit system designed to charge people to buy more tickets for their own commissions.

why is irctc wanting to be like that?

[keutoi]

This a probably a symptom of a much deeper problem. In theory tickets are non-transferable, but it is not enforced at all. A passenger train carries more than 500 people and if someone gets caught they just bribe out of the problem. Since the ground level problems are hard to solve, a solution at the top gave IRCTC some power to control and lower the available black market tickets. When the problem with identity and transferable tickets is solved then I think technical problems will be resolved.

Keep in mind Identity is hard to check and for rural passengers. There were very few such documents before AADHAAR etc.

[sokoloff]

> wouldnt keeping a fixed price solve the issue?

It depends on what “the issue” is. If the issue is that they want to allow some poor-but-lucky people to win the right to buy tickets below the market-clearing price, then keeping a fixed price doesn’t solve that issue.

[2Gkashmiri]

and they only way a multi billion dollar revenue earning department finds no other way to solving this is by making the experience on the website miserable for everyone. Only "luck" can help you get a ticket. bravo. hats off to the ingenuity of these people