New Delhi: A majority of travellers book their railway tickets from the website of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC). If you go by the statistics, then almost 83 per cent of the total reserved tickets are book through the website, as per the IRCTC. However, there is a waiting time of around 42-72 hours in order to get a refund in case of cancelled tickets booked through the website.
Earlier, the IRCTC had launched a feature for the website and mobile app aimed at helping passengers get an instant refund of their cancelled tickets thereby saving a considerable amount of time after the passengers cancels the ticket.
ALSO READ: Viacom, Zee Entertainment Merger Buzz Gathers Steam
Such a facility offers the freedom with funds to customers to go ahead and make subsequent bookings on the same/next day without waiting for credit of the refund amount into their bank account from IRCTC.
Now, IRCTC has launched a new feature of instant refund to IRCTC Website / Mobile App users using "IRCTC IPay". Under the new facility, its payment gateway "I-Pay" has been enabled with "AutoPay" feature.
How does the new feature work?
Under this new facility, users will have to allow for debit to their UPI bank account / other payment instruments through a mandate facility which creates a lien on his payment instrument.
The AutoPay feature offers higher reliability of ticket booking through the pre-authorized mandate as it cuts down the time for the users to type in the payment instrument details. It also helps in reducing the refund time for Tatkal bookings for the transactions that remain waitlisted and attract auto cancellation
Under the new system, funds are blocked from the user's bank account and the debit is processed for the full booking amount only after the confirmed ticket is booked.
If it's a waitlisted case of Tatkal bookings, where the booking remains waitlisted even after preparation of the final chart then the cancellation charges are only recovered from the transaction while the mandate gets released.
When is the feature most useful?
This new feature makes more sense in cases where a ticket is not booked even after deduction of payment from the user's Bank or Tatkal waitlisted ticket remains waitlisted even after preparation of chart and waitlist ticket is dropped from the chart. In such cases service charge, cancellation charge and payment Gateway Charges will be deducted from the user's account.
IRCTC has recently upgraded its user interface of the internet ticketing website of rallways www.irctc.co.in for seamless booking experience.