New Delhi: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has been decided to charge a fee of Rs 12 plus taxes on every ticket booked from service providers like MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Paytm and Cleartrip, a move that may make train ticket booking from these platforms costlier.
As per a Times of India report, currently, IRCTC charges a flat annual maintenance charge on these third-party service providers but there was no charge on each ticket booking.
Service providers are unhappy with this step as this would make them noncompetitive compared to IRCTC’s own booking site.
“Railway ticket booking was a revenue-negative or, at best, revenue-neutral. The expenditure on fees paid to the payment gateway was more than the fee charged to the customer. If this fee is not passed on to the customer, rail booking will become revenue negative,” one of the service providers was quoted in Times of India.
Earlier, IRCTC services like PNR status check and other railway ticket-related enquiries were not available on the portals of third party service providers.
Now, IRCTC opened up its systems to third-party service providers but there is a condition of 1:70 ‘look to book’ ratio.
It means there should be at least one ticket booking for every 70 enquiries made from third-party portals. If third-party service providers fail to meet this requirement, then for every enquiry they have to pay 25 paise. It is also a burden for the third party service providers.
IRCTC also charges Rs 5 for display of advertisements and Rs 15 for cash back offers or for clubbing ticket sales with third-party products and services.
In case of cross-selling of any third-party products, there will be an additional charge of Rs 25 per ticket, the report added.
