… is the worst travel website in the world. To start with, they make you sign up (why?). And because they don’t clearly tell you that they truncate the password after the 10th character (why?) I’ve been through about six usernames so far.
After that, the usability. You can’t search by city – you have to search by station. It also makes you press different buttons to find the fare and to check the availability. Trying for a different class means you have to start the search all over. Gah, I say. Gah.
And then, to top it all off, the thing crashes in between, barfs if you try to use the back button, and then you have to start from scratch. Death to the public sector.
go f yourself. Do you know what happened when British Rail was Privatised?
Try erail.in – looks like a good alternative when all you need to do is check availability, etc.
On the other hand, at least IRCTC (and KSRTC, et al) have a website that works. Other PSUs suck even more.
I firmly believe that the word “travel” is superfluous in the first sentence.
Apparently, you have not seen indianrail.gov.in yet. 🙂 irctc site is definitely functional , even though there are such irritations. But as #2 commentor says, atleast the site is there, and its much better than going and waiting in the queue.
Check trainenquiry.com if you want to see where exactly a train has reached. (Again screwed up UI, but functional)
No we don’t, Anonymous. Pray tell us.
I guess you can search using the city too. Just type a few letters of say “Bang..” and you’ll get the choices of city/cantt etc.
Also, you can’t book forward and return as one atomic transaction. If i want to make sure I have both ways for instance.
Fuck! Someone finally had the balls to say it. Man, this is so heart touching blog entry. Govt. of India cannot afford to fuck up more…
Not sure I agree. Have booked a few million tickets on IRCTC since they started and I think its a fantastic portal. In fact the entire family of portals run by CRIS is quite efficient especially trainenquiry.com which gives the current geographical position of a train to the nearest hour.
BTW
– you can search by city name using a wildcard
– i believe the reason for segregating different queries wrt Fare, Schedule and Availability is to manage response time and traffic (I mean this is a frickin huge database we are talking about here with an insane number of transactions happening every second)
– It allows you to print tickets or get them delivered (usually within a day) and allows Tatkal bookings too.
So cut them some slack. If you use the website regularly enough its actually quite endearing especially for a generation that spent its formative years in long winded queues at ticket counters.
I think the website is pretty decent.I myself have booked a number of tickets.Though it has a few minor flaws but i guess it has made life a ton easier.
Every other e-commerce website asks you to sign up and the page now Specifies the limit for username.So, signing up is not a big issue.As Mr. Jeeban says,you can easily search for cities by entering first three charcters.
Though the page crashes sometimes but i guess its much better than standing up in long queues at reservation counters.
Nothing in this world is perfect,i’m sure the portal shall overcome its flaws.
this is one of the worst website ever seen for any kind of booking website. there are 1000’s of user but servers and system used by irctc are outdated and their people are one of the worst people from north with no attitude to work nor capable enough
regards
tirath
Try out http://www.cleartrip.com/trains to avoid such hassle 🙂
YA……Absolutely….the IRCTC website is fucked up to core…..and server(HA…HA)……..it always states that its service is unavailable
i see the above comments from the year jan 12 2009 and even today 20 7 2012 the website acts the same way when needed most.
this irctc website is totally fuckedup “service is unavailable”