Many times travel plans are usually little last minute or at the max planned a month ahead. But unfortunately, this does not help if you are planning to travel by train in India. Due to the huge demand-supply mismatch, train tickets are always a ‘perishable’ commodity which gets sold out, sometimes, in less than 12 hrs.
So after being faced with this user pain point, again and again, RailYatri data scientists got down to running some intense algorithms for months together. And the result is a first-of-its-kind app feature which tells the user how soon(read by when) one should buy the available confirmed tickets in order to avoid disappointment. This feature available on RailYatri app, tells you within how many hours/days should one book the available ticket before they are SOLD OUT.
Nearly 50% of trains get filled up within a short span of 2 weeks after booking opens. Known as Rush-o-meter, this feature predicts the selling-out time of available tickets in Indian Railways. Using historical data and deep data analysis, RailYatri predicts the speed of ticket booking for all long-distance trains; i.e. how soon tickets get sold out on each train. While in some trains, tickets are available for months after booking opens, there are many popular trains for which tickets get sold out within 5–6 hours and the speed of ticket booking is as high as 51 tickets/hour.
So if you are still not sure about your travel plan, go to RailYatri home page-select Seat Availability — fill in your train number, source & destination of travel, date of journey — and guess what the app shows if there are tickets available and also tells you within how many hours/days the available tickets would be SOLD OUT. If you are lucky you might have days to finalize your plans. But there can be scenarios when the available tickets might get over in the next couple of hours (this happens on very popular routes or if the date of journey is very close). Hence, this app feature is a blessing and allows you NOT to MISS out on available tickets.
A first of its kind intelligence, RailYatri has been able to give this unique prediction with the use of Machine Learning algorithms. Having been launched a month back, this feature has been used by over 12,000 users every day. In the words of a regular RailYatri user, Satish Kumar from Allahabad “I am a student, so I try to travel home at every given opportunity and getting a confirmed train ticket is the biggest challenge. This feature is a blessing for me as it tells me when should I book my tickets. With this feature, I managed to book at the right time and get a confirmed ticket for my travel last week.”
CHECK SEAT AVAILABILITY AND BOOKING RATE
Though there are many apps which shows seat availability in trains, this level of data intelligence is being used for the first time in train travel. This innovation is a classic example of how Machine Learning is being used to make train travel convenient for millions of train travellers.
