With the motive to expand its business and increase its customer base, TravelKhana, an online food delivery service for railway passengers, will now cater to bus travellers and suburban railway networks in Delhi and Mumbai.

As per their business plan, the company will supply food to long-distance bus passengers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Vijaywada, Pune and Mumbai along with the metro network in Delhi and suburban network in Mumbai.

According to the article, Pushpinder Singh, co-founder and CEO of TravelKhana, quoted:

“We have seen places where people want to buy their meal when they get down from the train in suburban stations or during long distance journeys by bus, but good quality food is limited. We want to address this problem so that they can order their meals and get them.”

TravelKhana recently tied up with IRCTC for e-catering to provide food for passengers at rail premises. Its services will soon be available on IRCTC’s e-catering website as the integration is underway at this moment.

Currently, the four-year-old startup caters to 160 railway stations in India, serving 3,000 to 4,000 meals a day. Travelkhana expects to reach 12,000-15,000 daily meals by the end of this year.  By 2020, it aims to touch 1,50,000 daily meals. Elaborating on the same, Pushpinder Singh, stated:

“The volume can be achieved through the IRCTC tie-up, by adding new restaurant partners, branding across different railway properties and through marketing.”

To further attract customers, Travelkhana has revamped its technology platform and standardised its delivery model and prices across various restaurant partners.

With such business associations and extensive remodelling, Travelkhana is attempting to turn into a bigger player in the Indian travel industry.

Also Read: How IRCTC tied up with Indian and International brands to assist the travellers

The post TravelKhana expands its business in India, caters to bus travellers now! appeared first on TravHQ.

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation is well-known for changing the face of the railway ticketing in India. It has laid the groundwork for internet-based railway ticket booking through its website. This year IRCTC has been an exceptionally active player in the travel industry.

(Image: Electric locomotive of Indian Railways by Shan H Fernandes)

Over the past few months, IRCTC has tied up with innumerable indian and international brands to further enhance its business and fulfil the requirements of the travellers. Let us go through a few of them below:

 YatraGenie

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation collaborated with YatraGenie – a Bengaluru-based online bus ticketing and cab-booking platform. Through this tie-up, YatraGenie offers cab services to the passengers from Secundarabad station. This gives the liberty to the passengers to book cabs at the last minute from the station and reach their respective destinations with absolute ease.

 MobiKwik and Paytm

MobiKwik offers an instant one-tap payment method for ticket bookings. The users can carry out seamless online payments from the retailer’s platform with no redirection to the app. It has tied up with Paytm to make e-catering payment an easy option for the travellers.

Amazon and Mydala

IRCTC tied up with Amazon to provide the convenient online shopping experience to its customers. Through the app, the passengers are offered a variety of products ranging from consumer electronics to musical instruments. In the similar category, they joined hands with Mydala to provide deals and offers across categories like health and wellness, tattoos and retail shopping to its customers.

 KFC and Dominos

Recently, IRCTC has also associated with leading fast-food chains like KFC and Dominos. Currently, IRCTC provides an e-catering facility in 1516 trains without pantry cars.The KFC and Dominos services are available in trains running via New Delhi Railway Station. Passengers can place their orders through the IRCTC website or call on a toll-free number.  It is also planning to collaborate with food aggregators like Subway and Pizza Hut.

Foodpanda and Hello Curry

IRCTC has connected with many food tech startups in the past few months. A few of them include Foodpanda and Hello Curry. With these tie-ups, the two food tech startups have enabled the passengers to order from a variety of cuisine options during their travel. Foodpanda provides customers with the choice to order meals a few hours before their travel. The Foodpanda services are available currently only in Delhi whereas Hello Curry offers wholesome healthy meal options to passengers boarding different trains at Secunderbad station.

GoAir and Spicejet

IRCTC associated with the GoAir and Spicejet to assist train travellers with wait-listed tickets to book flight tickets by charging an incremental fee. The passengers get an opportunity to avail  tickets at a lower price as compared to standard price rates. Interested people can book flight tickets three days prior to their travel date, after cancelling their train tickets.

In this year, IRCTC has been seen joining hands with many players in different verticals to assist the travellers through its widely-available services.

Related Article: Foodpanda partners with IRCTC to offer food in trains

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Website and app based food delivery service Foodpanda is associating with IRCTC, subsidiary of Indian Railways that handles catering, tourism and online ticketing. Under this partnership, Foodpanda wants to allow passengers to order food from Foodpanda partner restaurants during their train journey.

A pilot program of this proposed association will be launched in New Delhi. No timelines have been defined yet but after rolling out in New Delhi, they will extend the service in more cities. The customers will have to order their food two hours in advance and pay using the online or cash payment options.

Commenting on this development, Robin Kalita, Director, Catering Services, IRCTC, said, “At IRCTC, it has been our endeavour to extend best possible services to our passengers. Food forms a very important part of the travel experience and IRCTC takes immense care to offer healthy and hygienic food to its travellers on-board. We are happy that we will be able to offer wider food choices to our consumers with this association and once our pilot project is successful, we will extend the service to more locations.”

Foodpanda, along with its partner brands JustEat and Tastykhana, has got large number of restaurant partners spread over 200+ cities. They will be able to offer a wide variety of food options to the travellers. Presence across wide geographies will help them expand the service quickly after the pilot.

“Our association with IRCTC will be an offering which addresses a huge consumer need prevailing for years. For long, consumers had limited food options to choose from while travelling with Indian railways but the newly launched e-catering service by IRCTC (approved by Ministry of Railways) is set to change the way Indians eat while travelling,” Foodpanda CEO Saurabh Kochhar said.

Foodpanda was founded in 2012 by Ralf Wenzel and Benjamin Bauer and recently raised USD 100 Million in latest round of funding led by Goldman Sachs. There are multiple startups that offer food delivery in trains (Read: Five startups that will help you get better food during your train journey).

IRCTC has been working hard to improve the customer experience with Indian Railways. For this they have improved on many fronts and partnered with businesses like Paytm for payments and mydala to offer deals to travellers. These associations will go a long way in helping IRCTC improve the customer experience.

The post Foodpanda partners with IRCTC to offer food in trains appeared first on TravHQ.

We all have been there. Trying to book train tickets only to be disappointed by the long waiting list. The problem takes a different scale if the distance is very long as the probability of a confirm ticket drops significantly. It is possible that there are cancellations along the route but you will end up with an unconfirmed ticket. This isn’t because there is no seat available but because there is no single seat available for the entire length of your journey.

Confirmtkt tries to capitalise on this and helps the travellers in finding a confirm train ticket. Similar to services like Ixigo and Trainman, it utilises IRCTC booking data to tell you how likely it is to get a confirmed ticket. The system learns from its past experiences which helps improve the predictions in future. It takes factors like seasonality, travel class, holidays and reservation quota into account for the prediction.

If the probability of getting a confirmed ticket is high, the notification service of Confirmtkt will send you an email when your ticket gets confirmed. But the real trick starts if the probability of a confirmed ticket is low. In that case, it can suggest you alternate ways to get confirm ticket. So if you can’t find a ticket from A to B, you can book two tickets from A to X and X to B. All you have to do is switch your seat at X station according to the second booking.

Using the service is quite simple. Enter source, enter destination, select date and it will list down the options for you along with the probability of confirmation for each train. This also comes along with the option to get alternatives in the same train. It doesn’t offer the option to book at this point but the developers might add the feature later when they have gained strong traction. Apart from the desktop website, Confirmtkt can also be accessed through the mobile apps. So the next time you are unsure about a waitlisted ticket, Confirmtkt might give you the assurance.

Website | Android App | iOS App | Windows Phone App

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