In today's world, train travel is at a distinct disadvantage. Railways, which have dominated transportation for more than a century, can no longer compete with air travel. If you have any doubts about the fairness of this comparison, examine how our expectations for buying train tickets were impacted by our expectations for purchasing airline tickets.
A major distinction between air and rail transportation is the importance of technology. In order to compete and thrive, airlines must depend heavily on their IT systems and invest in new technologies. A lack of clarity about what and why to innovate is the primary reason why the railways don't see IT as a strategic success element.
For this reason, it takes operators longer to keep up with changes in the market. As a consequence, customers have an unpleasant and perplexing irctc train ticket booking experience and service providers see sluggish development.
The state of the train reservation technology
In contrast to airplanes, hotels, rental cars, and even cruises, trains are not linked into the travel ecosystem in the same manner. Expedia and Booking.com, two of the most popular online travel providers, don't have train bookings available on their websites. Because of this, the passenger train business is even more isolated from the rest of the travel market thanks to specialty OTAs like Trainline. Let's examine the reasons behind this and the disparities that exist.
Lack of collaboration between railroads
Connecting airline tickets are simple to purchase. In the event of a flight cancellation, travelers may simply check in once and be rebooked on the next available flight. There is less competition, fewer passengers, and less cross-border transit when railroads do not form comparable partnerships.
Standardization is lacking
Only when all systems work in a comparable manner and utilize the same business logic, data format and data interchange technology can the holy grail of travel distribution be achieved. For example, the airline industry arose from a single booking system. As a result, diverse techniques, procedures, and products have been developed for train technology that did not follow the same evolutionary path. Global distribution systems (GDS) that power the world's major networks of transportation companies have less than half of the world's train companies participating.
Absence of any kind of client information.
There is a lack of understanding between rail operators and their clients. You can't get a complete picture of your consumers when they irctc train ticket booking in a variety of places, including online, at the station kiosk, or even on the train itself. Businesses are unable to correctly segment their customers and price their products because they have a broad view of a consumer.
It's a relic of the past.
For many established sectors, like the railway, legacy systems are the misery of their life. To save costs, developers often resort to workarounds and hacks to keep these systems running. They are also seldom built from scratches, such as when an airline reservation system is customized, which leads to inconsistency and a slowdown in system-to-system communication.