BHUBANESWAR: The hassles of standing in long queues in front of a booking counter for a movie ticket or the anguish of the houseful board will no longer haunt the viewers. Now you can e-purchase your tickets, thanks to the launch of www.bookticketnow.com, a web portal dedicated to booking tickets online.
This has been made possible by an engineering student Swagat Kar. The portal facilitates real time booking of tickets at screens across the city of Bhubaneswar as well as a few in Berhampur for the present and is moving fast to other cities and towns of the State.
All you have to do is to log on to the website and fill in the date and the show of the movie, along with the number of tickets to be purchased. This done, make your payment online by way of credit card, debit card of net-banking through a secure payment gateway.
The enterprise has partnered with all the major halls in the capital Sriya, Swati and Stuti Complex, Keshari Talkies and Maharaja Cine Complex as well as Gautam, Paramjyoti, Shiva and Shakti in Berhampur. Though same day booking is not available, one can get tickets in advance for the forthcoming days. Bookings for a new release are open at least four days prior to the date of screening in the theatres and continue up to a week of showing.
“Tickets are booked with seat numbers and rows chosen by the viewer himself online. About 20 per cent of the tickets are reserved for online bookings by the halls for every show. Online booking closes midnight for the next day’s show as the booking counter sales are based on the reports of e-ticketing”, Kar explains.
For the fourth-year student of Computer Science Engineering at Narayan Memorial Institute of Engineering and Technology here, the initiative is borne out of personal struggles to obtain movie tickets. “I wanted to relieve the people of the pain and inconveniences caused by the urge for watching a movie”, he says.
The enterprise, proprietary of Swagat, now employs three persons for operation of the system. But with steps for expanding it to other towns and cities, more hands would be taken in. The portal would soon be expanded to Cuttack, Rourkela, Sambalpur and Baripada. The facility is also being worked out to move beyond the borders to include halls in Kolkata too.