ICICI, one of the largest private banks in India has entered into a partnership with IRCTC to allow booking of train tickets through its website. This is the first time in which a PS bank has partnered with Indian railways. This service will be available for all users (whether they have an account with ICICI or not).
To book your journey tickets, open ICICI portal and click on book now button. The website will display a large popup with a disclaimer message.
Hit the click to proceed button and enter your journey details, date, class, quota and click search.
If trains are available for the entered date, select a choice and you’ll be prompted to enter your IRCTC login credentials.
If you’re not registered with the IRCTC, ICICI will let you create an account through its portal.
ICICI allows you to check PNR status, cancel tickets or go through the details of earlier transactions. The user can also check if a ticket is available for a specific date.
ICICI has planned to add this new service to their wallet and internet banking application for mobile devices.
IRCTC has been criticized a lot for its slow website. As ICICI will let you book tickets through its site, the load on the web server that powers IRCTC portal will be reduced, but there wouldn’t be any reduction of DB queries (assuming that data is not cached as the website is dynamic). So if you’re thinking that the IRCTC portal will be faster, you’re wrong. The performance of a web application depends on the DB as well as the web server.
By the way, ICICI is not the only third-party organization that allows reservation, cancellation of train tickets. IRCTC has partnered with a bunch of travel companies for the same. MakeMyTrip is one of them.
This move is good for the bank. ICICI will try to attract new customer by displaying hot offers on the web pages related to the train booking. It might also get commissions for every booked ticket. Over 100K people book tickets online every day. ICICI will earn a lot of money even if 1/4th of users use their portal to book train tickets.
