Book rly ticket on phone, get 5% on R-wallet recharge
Siddharth.Prabhakar@timesgroup.com
Chennai: 13.05.2018
Rail commuters in Chennai and Tamil Nadu who use the R-wallet to book tickets on mobile phones would soon get ₹5 extra when they recharge the R-wallet for ₹100.
The directive came from the Railway Board (RB) on May 3 to promote unreserved ticket booking through mobile phones. The scheme will be on trial for three months after which it will be reviewed.
Sources said this followed Southern Railway, covering Tamil Nadu and Kerala, writing to RB with some ideas buoyed by the tremendous response to m-ticketing in the zone. Since April 14, people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala have been booking unreserved tickets through the ‘utsonmobile’ application, skipping long queues. On the Chennai suburban railway network, this facility has been available since 2015.
Statistics accessed from Southern Railway show that within four weeks of the launch of the facility, at least 10 lakh passengers had booked unreserved m-tickets. This is 2% of the total unreserved tickets sold. On an average, anywhere between 40,000 and 80,000 m-tickets are booked everyday, sometimes touching the magic mark of 3%.
Apart from this, 30,000-40,000 m-tickets are being booked on a daily basis on the Chennai suburban railway network. This means that around one lakh mobile-tickets are being booked across Southern Railway on most days, say railway officials. “Our next target is to have a 5% penetration in the mobileticketing market,” said a senior official.
This is part of ‘mission five minutes’ of the railway ministry, which envisages a passenger being able to buy a ticket within five minutes of arriving at a station.
Around 93% of passengers in Southern Railway are in the unreserved segement and this has only gone up after the recent bus fare hike across Tamil Nadu, statistics show.
The Railway Board directive also stated that the maximum recharge limit on R-wallet had been increased from ₹5,000 to ₹10,000.
Siddharth.Prabhakar@timesgroup.com
Chennai: 13.05.2018
Rail commuters in Chennai and Tamil Nadu who use the R-wallet to book tickets on mobile phones would soon get ₹5 extra when they recharge the R-wallet for ₹100.
The directive came from the Railway Board (RB) on May 3 to promote unreserved ticket booking through mobile phones. The scheme will be on trial for three months after which it will be reviewed.
Sources said this followed Southern Railway, covering Tamil Nadu and Kerala, writing to RB with some ideas buoyed by the tremendous response to m-ticketing in the zone. Since April 14, people in Tamil Nadu and Kerala have been booking unreserved tickets through the ‘utsonmobile’ application, skipping long queues. On the Chennai suburban railway network, this facility has been available since 2015.
Statistics accessed from Southern Railway show that within four weeks of the launch of the facility, at least 10 lakh passengers had booked unreserved m-tickets. This is 2% of the total unreserved tickets sold. On an average, anywhere between 40,000 and 80,000 m-tickets are booked everyday, sometimes touching the magic mark of 3%.
Apart from this, 30,000-40,000 m-tickets are being booked on a daily basis on the Chennai suburban railway network. This means that around one lakh mobile-tickets are being booked across Southern Railway on most days, say railway officials. “Our next target is to have a 5% penetration in the mobileticketing market,” said a senior official.
This is part of ‘mission five minutes’ of the railway ministry, which envisages a passenger being able to buy a ticket within five minutes of arriving at a station.
Around 93% of passengers in Southern Railway are in the unreserved segement and this has only gone up after the recent bus fare hike across Tamil Nadu, statistics show.
The Railway Board directive also stated that the maximum recharge limit on R-wallet had been increased from ₹5,000 to ₹10,000.
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