Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Google and Railway bookings

I have always kept wondering what google can do to improve its services in India - and one opportunity is to look at the railway booking thing. While railway booking has made tremendous advances - you no longer have to stand in the queue and all but with the kind of speed in India and the way irctc.co.in works sometimes it can get painful to choose a particular train, check availability, then type in names, pick berth, choose a payment gateway and then finally pay. Now I dont know how many of you have used google for a flight search - internationally like Bang to NY and then you can pick dates and choose a service provider to check fares along with availability. I keep wondering why cant google do the same for Indian Railways - you search for SBC (Bangalore) to MAS(Chennai/Madras) - fortunately there is only service provider - so you can probably key in the date after that as well - say SBC to MAS 23/2/08 in the search box. Then it should give you the list of the trains and availability on particular class - like

Train SL 3AC 1AC 2AC
Bangalore mail - 225 25 1 5

and let all of these are links and then you click on say 225, a small window pops up - you can give your name, age, id proof and birth preference (ideally you could just opt to enter this out of ur google a/c profile if its for u) and then it goes to a google check out payment gateway automatically and ur ticket is e-mailed to you Of course, google could also work with irctc and figure out what ads it should put on the print out so that it matches with origin station and destination station and age/profile of traveller!

I probably dont know how tough this is technologically but if its done it can make life easier for a lot more people. And i keep refering to google - any of the search guys could do this - live/yahoo. Its all about integrating technology with user needs!

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