Getting train tickets in India is a nightmare. This duo came up with a clever solution

Remember the episode of the The Big Bang Theory where Leonard, Raj, Howard, and Sheldon kept incessantly hitting the refresh keys on their keyboards to book Comic-Con tickets? Booking last-minute or emergency railway tickets in India involves similarly drastic measures.

You might be wondering why wait until the last minute to book the tickets. That’s because getting a confirmed ticket for a train journey is next to impossible in India, unless your travel plans are made four months in advance – that’s the advance reservation period for a train.

If your travel plans are sudden, you are sure to end up with a wait-listed ticket. The uncertainty about whether your ticket will be confirmed, which goes on until the last few hours before the journey, can drive you crazy. If only there was a way to predict the chances of your wait-listed ticket getting confirmed. Sripad Vaidya and Dinesh Kumar Kotha faced the same problem every time they planned to travel to their home town in Hyderabad from Bangalore. So they found a solution and turned it into their new venture – ConfirmTkt.

This observant duo started tracking the ticketing trends of the train they usually take – the number 12785 Bangalore Express. They spotted a pattern in the way bookings and cancellations happen for that train. Based on this observation, they started booking wait-listed tickets which ultimately got confirmed. They decided to translate this into a piece of railway ticketing prediction software.

Machine-learning

ConfirmTkt predicts the confirmation chances of a wait-listed ticket by using machine-learning. This technique learns from its past experiences and evolves the future prediction process. It also takes into consideration various parameters such as seasonality (like a major festival or holiday period), travel day (weekend or weekday), travel class, and reservation quota. It maintains ticketing trends for weekends or holidays separately, as trends during these days often vary.

If the chances of your wait-listed ticket getting confirmed are high, you can subscribe to ConfirmTkt’s email notification service – it sends you an email notification when your ticket gets confirmed.

In cases where the chances of your ticket getting confirmed are slim, ConfirmTkt can also be used to discover alternate ways to get a confirm ticket. For example, if your ticket from Dehradun to Vadodara is wait-listed, ConfirmTkt offers break journey suggestions (book two confirmed tickets, from Dehradun to New Delhi and New Delhi to Vadodara). Alternatively, it may suggest booking a confirmed ticket for the next available station along the line.

It also lets you search for various trains plying between a source and destination station and shows the confirmation chances of wait-listed tickets for these trains. This can help users make informed ticketing decisions and maximize their chances of scoring a confirmed ticket. ConfirmTkt can also be accessed on a smartphone with its Android and Windows apps.

All aboard!

L to R: Dinesh Kumar Kotha, Sripad Vaidya, and Pranav Chimulkar (marketing lead at ConfirmTkt)

Vaidya is a software engineer and has experience working as a business analyst at IBM. Kotha, an alumnus of NIT Jamshedpur, was Vaidya’s colleague at IBM – he used to work as application developer for Java there.

The duo have tackled India’s transportation woes before. They came up with an Android app called Meterup which provides fare estimates for motorized rickshaws (dubbed “auto” in India) that would help users negotiate fares with auto drivers. The app, however, didn’t gain traction.

They started working on the ConfirmTkt project back in 2012. It took them almost two years and tests on around 2,500 trains to achieve 88 percent accuracy of their prediction algorithm. Once ConfirmTkt picked up steam, reaching out to users with zero marketing budgets was one of the biggest challenges that the duo faced.