Image Credit : India Today
Most of the times, passengers who travel by Indian Railways prefer to book tickets through the Indian Railways catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the internet ticketing website. As per the IRCTC data, around 83 per cent of the total reserved tickets are booked through it. However, as yet the passengers had to wait for almost 48-72 hours to get their refund for the cancelled tickets that are booked through online website.
Earlier, IRCTC had introduced a new feature for its website and mobile app through which the users can get an instant refund for their cancelled tickets thereby saving some considerable time. This phenomenon also enables the customers to have financial freedom, who wishes to purchase subsequent bookings on the same/next day without panicking for the credit of the refund amount into their bank account from IRCTC.
IRCTC IPay
IRCTC has launched a new feature of instant refund to IRCTC Website/ Mobile app users through ‘IRCTC IPay’. IRCTC has now facilitated its payment gateway ‘I-Pay’ with ‘Autopay’ feature.
Through this feature, user has to enable for debit to his/her UPI bank account or other payment instrument through a mandate facility that creates a lien on their payment instrument.
The Autopay feature make sure better reliability of ticket booking through the pre authorized mandate as it minimizes the user’s time in putting in the payment instrument details. It also lessen the refund time for Tatkal bookings for transactions that continues to be waitlisted and fascinates auto cancellation.
In the operation of the above feature, the fund gets blocked from the users bank account and the debit is taken for the entire booking amount once the confirmed ticket gets booked. On the other hand, for waitlisted issue of Tatkal booking, where the booking continues to be in waitlisted after the preparation of the final chart, only the cancellation charges get charged from the transaction following which the mandate is released.
The feature stands to be most useful on the ground when the tickets does not get booked after the deduction of payments from the users account or when the Tatkal waitlisted tickets remains waitlisted after the preparation of the charts and subsequently the waitlist ticket remains uncounted in the chart.
Cancellation charges, Service charges and Payment gateway charges gets debited from the users account. IRCTC has now upgraded its users interface of internet ticketing website of railways www.irctc.co.in to witness uninterrupted booking experience.