Let’s admit it. We all cross our fingers after booking a railway ticket in the hope that its will be a Confirmed booking but many a times our hopes are thrashed. We keep on hanging on the Waiting list and finally the seat goes to someone else. Booking tickets at the last moment (mostly happens with college students) and clinching on to the miraculous hope of not sharing a seat while travelling . All these small wishes come to a halt every time. Won’t it be good if there was a predictor that could notify us in advance whether to book a ticket or not or how soon our ticket would be a confirmed one?
Yes, there is something like that and it is Confirmtkt.com.
Confirmtkt.com solves the biggest problem of the 70 Cr train travelers in India. It predicts the ticket confirmation chances if the ticket is in waitlist. It helps users decide whether to book or not.
Searching Trains, Predicing ticket confirmation chances for the searched trains, helping users to take a decision on booking and predicting the PNR confirmation chances are some of its attractive features.
Dinesh and Sripad, who founded Confirmtkt, personally experienced the difficulties of getting a train ticket to travel to their native places. Whenever they tried to book a ticket and all they would get was waiting list. They started booking tickets by analyzing the past trends manually. And the idea dawned upon them. They thought that why couldn’t they build something that will analyze and tell the user whether to book a ticket or not. And that is how their journey started.
One would want to know the mechanism that Confirmtkt uses to predict the status of tickets. And it’s quite simple to understand. The intelligence behind the ConfirmTKT PNR predictions is very close to how humans think. Humans predict and act on the future based on past experiences. In the similar way, the ConfirmTKT algorithm analyses the past ticketing trends and predicts one’s ticket confirmation chances. It maintains confirmation thresholds for every train and predicts the ticket confirmation chances based on them. It is designed in such a way that it learns while predicting. So, the more it predicts the more accurate and efficient it becomes.
All that you need is a valid PNR. Enter the PNR and click “Get status “button to get the PNR information instantly. Just enter the PNR of the waitlist ticket and click “Get Status”. ConfirmTKT shows the ticket confirmation chances with in a fraction of seconds. Once you have finished checking your PNR status, if your ticket is in waitist/RAC and you want to be notified when your ticket gets confirmed, just enter a valid email ID to subscribe for PNR confirmation notification. Once your PNR gets confirmed, ConfirmTkt will send you an email notification with the detailed PNR information.
Dinesh and Sripad started this project in the April 2012 and were working on the data collection, logic derivations, analytics and Prediction algorithm tuning. It took almost 2 years to build a product to be more efficient and accurate. In July 2014, they launched Confirmtkt.com and later the ConfirmTkt Android Mobile App was launched.
Initially they went on to capture the market by attracting the users towards Confirmtkt.com. Currently they are planning to partner with other Indian travel portals to launch bookings.
The current user base as of now is 14,359. There are 4378 PNR registered with ConfirmTkt for notifications with 28,762 Unique Page Views. They also have almost 30% returning users and have predicted 9879 PNR status including registered PNRs. Their peak traffic till now has been 289 parallel users.
The company’s goal is to become a one stop travel portal which can get a confirmed ticket for its users even if it involves checking all the all the possible options. And to help achieve their goals, they need investors to help them expand our operations, hire new talent to build new features and market/advertise their product.
As they say, there’s no smooth journey in the path of success. Dinesh and Sripad too faced a lot of challenges. “Collecting data of all Indian trains and deriving logic out of it was the toughest challenge we faced” says Sripad. Being a 2 member team and handling all the tasks from regular website maintenance, new user acquisition, responding to the users’ queries become a daily challenge for them. However, nothing stops them as they coordinate pretty well with each other.
“We believe we are unique, we don’t have any one as of now who can compete with us” says Sripad. What sets ConfirmedTkt apart from its competitors (Pnr.me) is the accuracy and speed at which it predicts the status of tickets.
Its transparency, user data privacy and security, user experience, High mobile penetration and Clean user interface is what makes us different.
“Initially our accuracy was 88% when we launched. But now due to machine learning techniques used, our accuracy has improved and now it’s almost 94%” says Sripad.
Also the logic used for prediction is totally unique. What’s more interesting is that while predicting, the website takes into consideration things like – Day of Travel, whether it’s a weekday, weekend or a holiday, quota of travel, etc. which other websites don’t.
Dinesh and Sripad were room-mates during their course of work at IBM. It was then when they thought of starting up something on their own and then in October 2011, they came up with an app called MeterUp. Till date, they haven’t discontinued their Saga of creating and innovating, which also gave birth to ConfirmTkt.
