To give a push up to new start-ups, to reduce the excessive load on IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) website and to rationalize Annual Maintenance Charges (AMC) currently being levied on B2C (Business to Customer) agents, IRCTC has made few changes in B2C policy of E-ticketing. Policy changes have also been made to make the charging policy for B2C service providers more rational. It will have no impact on pricing of tickets to the public through B2C service providers as they are authorized to charge INR 20 per ticket for Second Class/ Sleeper Class and INR 40 for AC Classes.
These policy changes will inter-alia control the excessive inquiry load being thrown by B2C business partners/OTAs (Online Travel Agents) on IRCTC E-ticketing website. In comparison to normal booking wherein Look to Book ratio is much below 50, many of the OTA operators were having to Look to Book ratio beyond several hundred. Integration fee and AMC structure have now been rationalized to make it more practical in terms of usage by OTAs. Few OTAs and B2C service providers are making a very large number of tickets while others are very low on ticketing but their inquiry load is more. Integration and AMC charges have been reduced also on some fronts to promote start-ups who are doing good services on the technology front and can provide high tech and more user-friendly services to B2C users.
There has been demand from B2C service providers from a very long time to permit them advertising and cross-selling of other travel need related products to users on their portal to generate additional revenue from such e-commerce activities. This issue has now been addressed through policy changes and will help them to market travel and tourism-related products.