Now reach your destination, no matter what, with ConfirmTkt Alternates

Dinesh Kumar Kotha

9 years ago

It’s been a long time since I posted about my startup.

To those of you who missed my first post. Here is the link

It has been super exciting so far.

We started with predicting confirmation chances of train’s waitlist. Only reason to launch the product was to make sure users get a ticket to travel.

So if there are 10 trains on the waitlist and when ConfirmTkt predictes that it gets confirmed, we are proud to say that 95% cases it gets confirmed.

But there was a problem. Even with the prediction we could only give tickets to a few more people. There’s a huge gap between demand and supply. Our mission to give users an affordable ticket still remained unsolved.

One interesting insight we have observed is that 40% of the seats are going vacant. Mainly because they are not properly used. There were more trains on routes which have low demand. More seats allocated to stations where there is no demand at all.

We started trying to solve a very complicated problem. We always had this vision that no one should postpone his journey just because he is not getting an affordable ticket. Here comes phase 2 in ConfirmTkt. ConfirmTkt Alternates.

ConfirmTkt Alternates is a simple solution easy to understand but hard to build. It works this way. If direct tickets are not available it checks if tickets are available via a different station or from a station after the destination . We call this kind Same Train Alternates. Next it also checks if the journey can be combined with multi trains. Train +Train,Train+Bus combinations. Our smart sort takes into consideration basis on availability, duration, fare, comfort, etc. This feature helped us in serving tickets to 20% more users.

Currently this feature is only on android app and website.