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Dear Rail Fans
BEFORE TRAVELING IN A PREMIUM TRAIN
Please see the following Reservation Rules in Premium Trains
Indian Railways IRCTC has introduced 48 premium trains with...
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dynamic ticket pricing on IRCTC that can only be reserved online and will not be available to agents.On an average, about 4.63 lakh tickets are booked via IRCTC each day, and the demand increases considerably over peak holiday season. The group says that premium trains are being been implemented to meet this demand.
Features: The special trains will have only AC 2 Tier and AC 3 Tier classes with Rajdhani-like facilities, including catering. The Indian Railways experimented with this model during Christmas season last year. It looks like they intend to implement this model during every festival season, when demand exceeds the average.
Ticket fare: The dynamic fare pattern is similar to the one used by airlines with it going up with rising demand. The fare applicable to each day/transaction is indicated at the time of booking on the IRCTC’s e-ticketing website.
How is it different from normal trains:
Advance Reservation Period (ARP) of these trains will be a maximum of 15 days.
The ticket fare follows a dynamic-pricing model, and fares will be much higher.
Tickets can be booked only online, via IRCTC’s website. It will not be sold over the reservation counter.
No wait-list tickets will be issued to passengers on these trains.
Tickets won’t be refunded unless the train gets cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
No concession is applicable in this train, irrespective of their age. However, after charting, vacant berths will be offered at the current-day booking counters in the originating stations.
Recent developments
IRCTC has been brushing up its services by introducing various features. Lately, it announced an online option for passengers to book retiring rooms at railway stations, and introduced the e-wallet scheme in November 2013. Other recent developments include revamping its journey planner, introducing a Windows app, and launching an e-commerce platform.
Disadvantages:
This sounds like a win-win situation for passengers who are often willing to pay a premium rate to get confirmed train tickets. Rather than approaching agents, one can now book their tickets on these premium trains. The biggest issue however is the one has to do this through IRCTC, which is notoriously incompetent. It is extremely difficult to make a booking during the day the company should invest more time and resources to improve its services so that people will be encouraged to try out such premium services.
A Special Report published in "Business Standard" today
Title: Soon, premium pricing of rail tickets on 37 routes
Last December, the Indian Railways launched a unique initiative that now looks set to pay it rich dividends.Anticipating a huge rush for railway tickets for air-conditioned (AC) travel on the Delhi-Mumbai route, it had operated a premium train service to connect the two cities during the Christmas-New Year holiday season last year. And, believe it or not, it sold one-way AC Tier-III tickets at up to Rs 12,000 apiece and AC Tier-II ones at up to Rs 17,000 - six to seven times higher than the ordinaryRajdhani Express fare on this route.
If travel experts are to be believed, the premium the Railways pocketed during the pilot train service is not surprising. The demand for rail or air tickets is huge during the December holiday season, when even airfares go up to well over Rs 12,000 for a one-way journey. What Indian Railways did was to tap into this market by using a dynamic-fare system to boost revenue.
The good sign is that the lessons from the pilot run are not going waste. To cash in on the huge demand for tickets in some sectors, the Railways is now planning to adopt a dynamic-pricing model on 37 premium train routes.
Similar trains will be planned in coming months on select routes to Bikaner and Goa during the holiday rush. "We have identified 37 routes on which, throughout the year, there is a persistent waiting list at origin and destination points. We are in the process of drawing a plan to run premium trains on these routes. The base fares for these trains will be higher or equal to the fare of 'Tatkal' tickets of other trains," D P Pande, member (traffic), Railway Board, told Business Standard.
Operations of Rajdhani and other trains on these routes would remain unaffected; the initiative would cater to the demand from passengers willing to pay more, said Pande. The Railways is also in the process of building a technology to automatically schedule a premium train when waiting lists on regular trains on a route exceed a certain threshold.
The financial importance of the Railways' December pilot run could be gauged from the fact that the service fetched it 43 per cent more revenue than Tatkal tickets on the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani Express. It is estimated that the Railways normally earns about Rs 19 lakh from a one-way journey on a train like Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani. But these trains can in no way make up for the loss the Indian Railways suffers on running passenger operations. Railway passenger fares were subsidised by about Rs 25,000 crore last financial year.
How are the tariffs decided?
The tricky issue in dynamic pricing is to figure out how high the tariff can go and to what extent a commuter will pay higher rail tariffs, given that one can get an air-ticket at around the same price. For this, the Railways has come up with a smart-pricing formula to compete with airways and increase fares in sync with the demand curve. The formula has a floor price equivalent or more than the Tatkal Rajdhani/Mail tariff. The price will further increase in tune with the demand curve - the rate at which the tickets are booked. A team of officials will also monitor the prices of air tickets at that time and keep the ticket price for premium trains lower than airfares.
Like the air travel on low-cost flights, commuters will not be allowed to cancel tickets on premium trains or seek refund on those, unless a train has been cancelled by the Railways itself. No waiting list reservations will be permitted, but a limited number of reservation-against-cancellation (RAC) tickets will be issued. The tickets for the premium trains will be booked only through the internet.
Since the ticket prices will fluctuate according to demand, a 'bucket ticket' option will be made available for booking multiple tickets for the family at the same price.
The challenges ahead
Without further capacity augmentation, more premium trains, which will get a preference to other passenger and freight trains, might add to the burden on the rail infrastructure. "But we are banking on higher earnings from premium trains to make up for the marginal increase in costs in the form of delays in movement of freight traffic," said a senior railway official.
ON TRACK FOR PROFITS
More special/premium trains
• Seven premium trains were run under pilot service on the Delhi-Mumbai route (onward and return)
• More premium trains to be run during the Dussehra-Diwali-Chhath holiday rush
• Next premium trains to Goa and Bikaner as local events have increased demand
Profit boost
• Rs 5 lakh: The profit the Railways normally books on running a one-way Rajdhani Express train on the Mumbai-Delhi route
• Rs 7 lakh: The Railways' profit was nearly 43% higher on the pilot service on the same route

Source of this special report: Indian Railways, travel portals