The Indian Railways & Tourism Corporation is entering the airline ticketing space, and will launch air.irctc.co.in this week, reports IBNLive. We tried, and while there is an advertisement for air ticketing at RailTourismIndia.com, an IRCTC website, which links to air.irctc.co.in, but on clicking, the site doesn't load. While this initiative might suggest that this is going to be just another online travel agent, readers must keep in mind a few things: - The scale at which IRCTC operates: being the primary online ticketing service for India's monopoly railways business, IRCTC reported 15.3 million transactions in March 2012 alone. To give you some context of revenues, in August 2008, when IRCTC did only 4.9 million transactions, it reported $102 million of online ticketing (gross) transactions for the month. More on that here. The IRCTC has since stopped reporting monthly revenue information. - The opportunity in connecting flights and trains: IRCTC can offer its existing user base an integrated travel solution, and allow them to combine different modes of travel, based on availability of time and tickets, and travel preferences of the user. This is particularly useful for those travellers who want to travel to cities not connected by air, and the air ticketing site can thus offer a combined air and rail offering. This saves a traveller from figuring out trains separately. Of course, other OTA's could also do this, but so far, they're keeping railway and airline ticketing options separate. - Retail outreach: online payment ventures like Itz Cash have deployed…
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