BENGALURU: Picture yourself having an emergency where you have to travel to a certain destination by train and realise that all seats are seats are taken. To help those facing this predicament, startup app ConfirmTkt – a travel search and booking engine – is making the process of ticketing easier using for data analytics and machine learning.
The app predicts confirmations and suggests best available travel options across trains, buses and cabs by effectively utilising the available inventory. The startup has partnered with IRCTC and started booking train tickets on the platform. Apart from ticket discovery, it also provides features like train tracking without internet, wake up alarms, offline schedules and bus bookings.
“We both used to travel to our hometowns – Nizamabad and Khammam – via Hyderabad almost every alternate week. But we would always be waitlisted. So we built a software that can predict based on past data. We gathered past data of the last few Fridays, and we used to book tickets based on it. Surprisingly, we used to get the tickets confirmed as per our analysis. We then automated the process and built algorithms for it from early 2012 and went live by July 2014,” says Dinesh Kumar Kotha, co-founder and CEO, along with Sripad Vaidya.
In Bengaluru alone, 8,02,524 downloads have been made. “We are working on a single motto – getting confirmed tickets to our users,” says Dinesh.
How it works
Every year, of 750 million tickets booked, 41 per cent tickets are waitlisted. And of these waitlisted tickets, about 130 million tickets get auto-cancelled. These travellers either they need to cancel their trips and go back home, or look for some last minute options. So to get confirmed tickets, Confirmtkt has built a graph-based algorithm which searches across all the different quotas available, and also all the travel options across trains, buses and cabs to look for hidden options available at that point of time.