Trend Analysis of Online Tourism in Indian Railway

Indian railway introduced online tourism services using their online business portal in January 2008 to leverage emerging technological solutions into its business operations and since then it is providing varied services to tourists such as online booking facility of rail tour packages and holiday packages, online hotel booking, online cab booking and online air-ticket booking. This study focused on illustrating the pace and pattern of above online tourism services initiated by Indian railway and identifying the key issues that deserve attention of tourism players to exploit the opportunities provided by online tourism in long term perspective. All the data used in the study has been collected by authors’ themselves from the records maintained by Internet Ticketing Reservation Centre of Indian Railways (IRCTC). The results of the study observed more inclination of consumers towards online tourism services as compare to paper based services. But only few online services such as tour package bookings are performing well and some other services such as online cab booking and hotel booking are not very responsive. In this backdrop, this study develops an argument to offer more integrated online services to users, to focus more on creating awareness among users about benefits of online tourism services along with providing some promotional incentives to users