Hack To Auto-Fill Passenger Details In IRCTC – Helps Big Time For Tatkal Bookings

29 August, 2012   Consumer Travel Products, Travel Technology, Trips and Tips   4 Comments
IRCTC Hack to autofill

IRCTC (Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation) is the rail operator monopoly in India. They recently introduced Flight booking in their website and its going great guns. IRCTC makes 50 lakh a day only through flight ticket sales on their site. Few statistics of IRCTC blows the mind - On an average, the site gets over 55 lakh hits per day; 1+ lakh tickets booked every day. That explains the Alexa ranking of 458!

However, there is one aspect of the site that many rail travelers talk or worry about – that’s the performance of the website. Especially, the performance / response time of the site during Tatkal (last minute) train ticket reservation.

The site gets 8 lakh concurrent hits at their Tatkal ticket opening time (10 am). During Tatkal, IRCTC make 1,500 to 2,000 bookings per minute. Industry report says that for every 1 second delay in page load time, booking conversion is affected by 7%.

Tatkal booking opens at 10 AM and all Tatkal seats gets sold in 15 minutes time. Every minute counts while making Tatkal reservation, we would say – even every second counts. If you are few seconds late in completing the reservation, your seats will be taken by someone else for sure. Nike’s caption (Just Do It) doesn’t apply during Tatkal, a slightly modified caption might work – Just Do It FAST.

In the reservation process, the steps are – Search, Results, Passenger Details, Payments. The page that has many manual data entry is Passenger Details. Digital Inspiration has built a hack to auto-fill the passenger details.

All the traveler has to do is – Goto http://ctrlq.org/irctc/, enter the traveler details, click “I’m feeling lucky” button, add the newly generated button to bookmark bar. Now the hack holds all the passenger data you entered.

When traveler makes a Tatkal reservation in IRCTC website, while in the Passenger Details page, the traveler has to click on the bookmark item, the hack will auto-fill the passenger fields in IRCTC passenger details page.

This is not rocket science. A very simple hack, but a very useful hack. A lot of things that we need in life are very simple ones, like this auto-fill hack.

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for the neat work.
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4 Responses to Hack To Auto-Fill Passenger Details In IRCTC – Helps Big Time For Tatkal Bookings

  1. Simon says:
    29 August, 2012 at 11:58 am

    Awesome! Every micro-second counts on the IRCTC site especially Tatkal! thanks guys!

    Reply
  2. swaminathan balasubramanian says:
    29 August, 2012 at 12:55 pm

    Super.. Also for the ones who are not aware of the Master list option, we can add the list of passengers before hand and just load them here in the IRCTC page itself before making a booking.

    But this hack saves a little more time than using a master list. Thanks for the post.

    -Swami

    Reply
  3. Anantpla says:
    29 August, 2012 at 3:52 pm

    This is a wonder hack. I remember rushing things to get that one ticket in the tatkal quota.
    How long this hack would work is questionable thou’. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
  4. Christian Tours says:
    30 August, 2012 at 2:22 pm

    This should definitely speed things up. Hope it last.

    Reply