App of the Week: Confirmtkt

The pain of booking tickets has been a nightmare for many. Although, it has become easier to book confirmed tickets when there’s a considerable amount of breathing space between the booking date and journey date, it’s still difficult for last-minute bookings. Tatkal gives you some relief to book your journey one day before, but again it has limited scope since the tickets run out with the blink of an eye. At the end, you take a leap of faith to book a wait-listed ticket with hopes of having it confirmed later.

This isn’t favourable when you’re travelling with family or with a group of people. Confirmtkt predicts the confirmation chances of wait-list trains, advising whether you should book the tickets. Using the app is fairly easy, and by simply entering the source, destination and date of travel, you can search the available trains and their confirmation chances. It follows three levels of a colour coded confirmation chance. Green has more than a 70% chance of acquiring a confirmed ticket, Yellow denotes a chance between 30-70% while Red has the least chance of less than 30%. Filters will let you choose the class of boogey you prefer to travel and another filter lets you pick general bookings or tatkal.

The ticket confirmation algorithm uses several parameters such as station quota, holidays, popular seasons, and also the day of the week. Essentially, the confirmation chances will vary during seasons. It will also take into note whether it’s a weekend or a regular weekday. The booking habits is dependent on historical data consisting of booking, cancellation data and PNRs submitted by users in public forums. Confirmtkt apparently has been working since the last two years developing the algorithm and testing it over 2,500 trains, and about 15 lakh PNRs were registered before launch. If the algorithm fails to predict a confirmation, the incorporation of machine learning makes sure that it learns and improves to get the prediction right next time.

Other than the prime feature, it also lets you search trains for their routes and schedules, get your PNR status etc. You can enable SMS notifications to get your PNR status whenever there’s an update, a crucial feature when you’ve booked a wait-listed ticket. While searching for journeys, the app will list out alternative routes to travel as well.

Currently, Confirmtkt claims to witness 40,000 daily active users on the app while their website handles 11,000 active users daily.

Confirmtkt wants to expand its prediction algorithms to other avenues and soon plans on including bus, flight, train and cab bookings. So, users will be able to predict their chances and directly book a ticket without leaving the app. To make it more seamless, they also plan to suggest alternative routes through other forms of transport. This way, a failed ticket confirmation will throw an alternative flight or bus route.

Confirmtkt is currently available on the App Store, Play Store and the Windows Store.

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Abhijit Dey

A Star Wars fan and sci-fi enthusiast. When I'm not playing games on my PC, I usually lurk around the Internet, mostly on Reddit. View Full Profile