Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the online ticketing subsidiary of the government owned Indian Railways has bagged the Rs 120 million contract to be the official ticketing agency for the Commonwealth Games being hosted in Delhi later this year in October. Who else had bid? There are a large number of ticketing sites in India, from travel sites like MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, bus ticketing specialists Redbus, to event ticketing sites like Kyazoonga, TicketGenie and BookMyShow. IRCTC will develop a dedicated website for the ticket sale and a total of 2.2 million tickets of different denominations will be sold through the new site for different events of the Games. IRCTC will also allow users to choose seats of their choice for a particular event and sold out seats will also be mentioned. Frankly, given how the IRCTC site is designed, we wonder if they have the ability to develop a site that looks great, but there is little doubt about their ability to handle a large number of transactions: their railway ticketing website does over 5 million transactions a month, even though the experience is often tedious and not user friendly. According to the organisers the sale of tickets is expected to generate revenues worth Rs 1.2 billion with tickets priced between Rs 100 and Rs 1000. Tickets for the opening and the closing ceremonies at the Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium is expected to be priced higher than the normal tickets. Besides the online process, tickets will also be…
