“Festivals” are a dominant part of our lifestyle and culture in India. If you are someone who lives far away from your family, festivals provide you a great opportunity to meet your family. You have to get disappointed when you check out for the indian railway reservation seat availability enquiry, if you don’t plan in advance at such times. It shouldn’t be a big concern for you if you are ready to travel by air. However, we don’t want you to pay some extra bucks, when you can get the job done for much less than that. Of late, this scenario is slowly changing. Availing train tickets for short distances (400 to 700 kms) have become relatively easier than getting air tickets.

What were you doing on the last Dussehra…?

The valid example for the above point made would be the time of Dussehra in 2015. All the students from schools and colleges, employees from offices were granted holidays for a week. A huge crowd and high demand for the railways was anticipated. However, much to the surprise of railway officials and travelers, train enquiry seat availability revealed that many coaches were running with vacant seats. On the other hand, the air tickets were simply unavailable. Another interesting point to be noted here is that the fare of executive class train ticket is barely a couple of hundreds cheaper than the air ticket for the same distance!

Wondering what could the reason for this…?

You might have taken by surprise as you have skipped through the above lines. Now, check the factors which greatly influenced this scenario:

• Fall in crude oil prices: The majority of the credit goes to the marginal fall of crude oil prices in the recent past years. This fall in prices has allowed the air lines to lower their fares without affecting its profit significantly.

• New railway connections: Indian railways have put their efforts to establish multiple connections between different cities. The targeted tracks were the cities, which were 400 to 700 kilometers apart. The passengers are left numerous options in railways than in airways for the same route. This has divided the railway traffic.

The combination of above stated factors have made the passengers to chose air ways even though the fares of railways was just marginally lower than that of airways.

Something to learn for our railway authorities:

This incident has provided the necessity to revive the existing railway system. Plans are made to implement a dynamic fare fixing system in our railways. Before taking decisions on increasing the capacity by introducing new lines, the traffic managers should analyze the existing competitive market and anticipate the possible abnormal passenger behavior. Special care has to be taken in the phase, where crude oil prices are relatively lower. The air ways try to exploit this low price by decreasing the fares. Apart from these issues, Indian railways has also stepped ahead to make complete use of growing IT in India. The online ticket sales platform has made the ticket booking cancellation procedures relatively easy. In the long run, Indian railways have aimed to increase the standards of trains and stations.