Indian Railways opened up it’s ticket booking APIs a few weeks back and here are some fine prints that you need to understand:
- Must have minimum annual turnover (i.e. Gross transaction value) of Rs.5 crore in last financial year from Travel business.
- The OTA will be required to submit a one time non refundable deposit of Rs. 20 lakh once the proposal is approved by IRCTC.
Restrictions
- OTAs would not be allowed to advertise any Air/Land/ Hotel/Package/ tourism related
product, other than IRCTC Tourism products on any of the Rail E-ticketing pages. This
also applies on the e-ticket print out. - The partner OTAs would not be allowed to club rail tickets with any other products or
services which pose direct or indirect competition to IRCTC’s tourism products,
without permission of IRCTC. - OTA license is valid for only 1 year – and will be extended without any extra fee.
Package Resellers Commission
IRCTC in collaboration with OTA, would allow Reselling of some or all of its tourism
services/packages.
- Rail tour Packages : OTA’s commission : 10% gross and 9.6% net commission
- Holiday Packages: OTA’s commission : 10% gross and 9.6% net commission
- Buddhist Train: OTA’s commission : 15% gross and 14.4% net.
- Bharat Darshan: OTA’s commission : 5% Gross and 4.8% net.
- Car Rental: No commission
- Hotel Booking: To be launched
What’s your take on Indian Railways’ proposal? Is this startup friendly or will be limited to top few OTAs?
Download the pdf
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Needless to say…. these all requirements are tailor-made for someone or type of travel companies …. for the poor of the rich by the rich.. else they could have mentioned these requirements also :-
1> These companies must be having representative in railway ministry..
2> They must have donated ..something in ministers last election or willing to do same in next year election..
——- What a waste…
Ninja, Please do not assume that all government people are generally corrupt or money sharks.
Dear Anurag !
No one is assuming that “all government people are generally corrupt or money sharks”, its fact.
I had read their EOI document a few months ago and was quite dissapointed by the terms and conditions (5 crs etc etc)
it effectively excludes most of the startups in India from getting into this very lucrative segment..
sigh
Anything that requires a 20 lakh deposit cannot be startup friendly. Just breaking even that kind of money from selling railway tickets would take years.
It is pretty clear that they are only looking at big players at this moment, and having a monopoly on the biggest travel means in India, they can afford to do that.
Well, to be fair their main idea is *not* to be startup friendly, is it ? Its a big service, and would like QoS, support strength etc that the bigger guys can bring in, though yeah, the requirements do seem written down for a preferred partner.
Its like the huge prices BSE etc need one to pay even for the 15mins delayed feeds! The startups inability to monetize quickly enough in a large enough way cannot be reason for these huge turnover businesses to change strategy. I mean its a running, existing biz, not an incubator, after all.
As startups – lets look beyond. Are there compelling use cases as related services that can be provided alongside/with the players who get involved with this ? Can we offer a quick trip planner or concierge that helps with the next level of service ? Where to go, what to plan for, get the cab, book the excess luggage, even plan a tuk-tuk ride or a nice alternative diversion for part of the journey, or whatever, There are endless niches, and possibilities. The big easy fruit is just that – and obviously easy for the big boys to pick on. The smaller, bolder, not-yet-tried-or-proven stuff is what startups should be about – innit ?
The idea is that they don’t want to be bothered with every Tom, Dick and Hari who wants to build his own front-end. They have no bandwidth to support it. They’re instead clearly aiming for service API resellers. Several companies are already in this business.
I work for an organisation that sells train tickets to end customers and can understand where they are coming from. However, it also makes very little sense for startups because the margin on each ticket is already ridiculously low, and half of that too is taken away by the reseller. (Which is perhaps not a bad situation given that the railways are almost always running over capacity in the passenger segment [as against freight].)
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What the heck? this is surely not for startups. howcome a startup will be having a turnover of 5 crores in last financial year. fees/commissions are heavy too. Dear startups, think something else. forget indian railways.
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Yeh sarkari kutte hain.Hame nahi khane denge.
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Indian railways infrastructure in the last five years have improved a lot.
http://www.indiainfraguru.com/railways.html
Nice post. Its useful to me.
Well..Just because a company is startup does not mean it cannot provide QoS etc.
I think Railways opening up API is a good sign. But at the end of the day, same old thinking, deposits, last years tax returns, to setup a “X” business do you have experience in “X” business.
GOI has to open up its mind to. These kind of limitation will not do any good for Indian Entrepreunership.
Again, thats my take on that. I am doing ground work an ecommerce site, I got little excited by seeing this, but looks like there arent any margins in Railways eCommerce. SO I guess, I will pass on this for time being.
very strange to see the Goverment policies on Indian railways API.
I started my Business recently and thinking to get the API for trains from somewhere but by seeing this i didnot hesitated to drop my idea for going to integrate the Indian Railways API in our travel portal.
Within these posts someone said true that these are just for the rich people to make more rich and how can a starter get a turover for 5 crores and non refundable 20 Lakhs. Years will go by to earn that money as commision from IRCTC.
I think Goverment should think about it carefully and make something better with the view of Starters and beginers.
Thanks
From what i can see – this seems to be a joke. 5 crore transaction and 20 lakh deposit – In order to call a indian railway api why should my company show 5 crore and deposit 50 lakhs. Only thing which is required is we must have a travel portal with better traffic. I think if they would have made things based on parameters such as traffic then that’s logical – who ever made this decision is not an honest human being – Can we file a lawsuite against such kind of decisions ??
commsoft is master in API integration and successfully integrated IRCTC API for our exteem client. We are leaders in online application development like Mobile Recharge Appliction, IRCTC API integration, AIR Ticket booking application, Hotel Booking Application etc.
Mr.Ravinder can you tell me where coommsoft is, because I’m looking for a vendor who can integrate a list of apis to my website, I own a company based at Hyderabad,
Regards,
Prashant.
Hi,
If I just want to integrate seat availability and not ticket booking. Is this API available open
Regards,
~Anuj