Booking Trains from outside india - HELP!

Hi,

I%26#39;m trying to confirm my travel within india for my trip in April. I know exactly where I want to go and on what trains but cannot process the payment on the railtourismindia website. I am selecting the bank (apparently Citibank is the best bank to process), but it seems to stall at submit. Does anyone else have this problem. Does this website not work with Macs?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sam

Booking Trains from outside india - HELP!

Which site are you using? The official site of Indian Railways is http://www.irctc.co.in/

Booking Trains from outside india - HELP!

Hi,

Yes that is the one.

S

It%26#39;s not the easiest site in the world to use, I have to admit; the first time I tried to buy a ticket on that website, it took me longer to buy the ticket than the actual train journey took!

There are several reasons why you may not be able to get past the gateway, but in my experience the two common ones are: (i) the whole process took too long, while you checked everything a second and third time, and the connection ';timed out';. (2) You may have pressed ';BACK'; to check on what you just entered, and in that case you have wiped out everything you%26#39;ve done so far, and have to go back and start again.

Of course, there may be other specific problems in your case, but these are the two that kept happening to me. I wanted to buy something like 50 tickets in total, on thirteen or fourteen different trains, and I tell you that when I finally got it all done, there was nothing more that India could possibly do to frighten me... the holiday itself was, by comparison, a breeze!

You have been well-advised so far... the Citibank gateway is the one to use, and when it comes up, you hit ';Other card'; (or similar) if you are not actually a Citibank customer.

Maybe you%26#39;d be wise to take a whole day off work, get onto www.indiamike.com, and read the L-O-N-G thread called something like ';Booking Indian Trains from Abroad';. Not only will you learn some invaluable tips, but you%26#39;ll enjoy reading the tales of woe of scores of other travellers who have tried to book at www.irctc.com. and have decided that they wouldn%26#39;t give up regardless of what the website kept doing to them. Nearly all of them lost battles, but eventually won the war...sometimes, however, at the expense of their sanity. But the thread is genuinely funny, and you will know that you%26#39;re not alone in your problems. Not by a long shot.

The thread will also tell you of an alternative booking site which is apparently a tiny bit ';friendlier';, and run by Thomas Cook. However, it, too, has the Citibank gateway button right at the end, and the one time I used it (when I couldn%26#39;t make irctc do the job for me), it had exactly the same problems as the official site.

And even when you finally get the site to work, your problems are not over yet. Do you know about waitlisting? You can spend weeks checking the progress of your tickets towards that golden state of ';confirmation';, and often you have a dilemma on your hands: cancel and try again with a different train, or just hang on and hope for the best. Indiamike has threads about this aspect of train bookings, too.

Fortunately, the trains, when you do manage to get on one, are comfortable and reliable, if not always punctual. Believe me, it%26#39;s worth persevering! Just keep your sense of humour (which, I assure you, you will need to pack when you finally head off to India).

You may wish to save yourself a whole lot of headache and ask an agent to book tickets for you instead. The fee is nominal; and unless your entire journey is by train, you will probably be using an agent somewhere or the other for car hire or some other service.

- Deepa

Much thanks for both of you responses. It is nice having confirmation that it is not just me and my semi computer literacy that is messing up!

Given the trials and tribulations the agent route sounds the way to go.

Deepa, do you know of a good agent that I should book through.

Thanks,

Sam

book it on makemytrip.com

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