Travelling on waitlisted tickets becomes history with ConfirmTkt app

BY ANUSHA ASHWIN It took barely 20 minutes for thousands of railway tickets to be sold out when the counters opened 120 days ahead for advance booking for this year’s Diwali that falls on October 30, 2016. In such a situation, how can one make last minute railway travel plans with a confirmed ticket? “Worry Not!” says Dinesh Kumar Kotha, Co-Founder & CEO of ConfirmTkt, who has a solution for booking and travelling with a confirmed ticket even at the last hour.

ConfirmTkt is a ticket discovery tool for Indian travelers. The company is on a mission to provide confirmed tickets to travel no matter what. ConfirmTKT.com is an IRCTC train PNR predictor, which is backed by unique and efficient algorithms that predicts a traveller’s IRCTC PNR in seconds based on historical trends. It also assists the traveller in deciding whether to book or not if the train is in wait list. The app assures that one can predict PNR confirmation status after booking rail ticket and discover all the possible alternatives to get a confirmed train ticket against the ticket reservation.

Certainly, the app eases ticket reservations, but to get this running in real time to this level was no easy go for its founders Dinesh Kumar Kotha and Sripad Vaidya. Headquartered at Bengaluru, ConfirmTkt saw daylight for the first time on July 5, 2014. After a brief stint at IBM, Kotha who was first part of a failed startup named Meterup-Taxi aggregator, joined his friend Vaidya, an ex-IBMer with more than five years of experience in analytics, in creating ConfirmTkt. While, Vaidya handles analytics, product management and operations, Kotha heads product development at ConfirmTkt.

“We initially started with solving the train wait list problem with data analytics and machine learning by predicting the train ticket confirmation chances based on historical trends and also suggesting alternative travel options by effectively utilizing the un-used inventory on trains and this lasted well over two years. Initial struggle was with marketing and once we were ready with the product our main challenge was to get first few users. Our breakthrough came when we first got featured in a major newspaper and from then on we have seen viral growth. We also had problems with hiring our initial employees. But now we are a team of 16 members and are a technology-driven company,” excitedly opens up Kotha.

In two years, ConfirmTKT has notably received an overwhelming response from the users and has seen over 8 lakh app downloads and serves close to 50,000 daily active users. ConfirmTkt’s app is available on Google PlayStore, Apple AppStore as well as on Microsoft Windows platform.

Confirming ticket alternatives

“We gained quite a good amount of traction with almost zero marketing spend. Being able to predict the confirmation chances based on data driven insights and to discover all possible alternative options to travel with a confirmed ticket is a significant benefit to drive users to Confirmtkt. We are not simply dependent on the availability of tickets for confirmation. We go beyond that. We unlock hidden options suggest alternatives in order to help users get a confirmed ticket. This is an exclusive feature of Confirmtkt. And the mission is to enable users to book confirmed tickets for their journeys even at the last moment,” explains Kotha.

Although, ConfirmTkt gained thousands of users, the founders knew that they could not stop there but improvise and offer more. In June this year, the company launched a new app ‘ConfirmTkt Alternates’ that helps waitlisted train passengers to get confirmed tickets by unlocking all the hidden and other best available travel options.

Vaidya, who is the brain behind the analytics of Confirmtkt, explains that the company uses analytics to assess current as well as past booking trends, station quota, seasonality, holidays, days of the week and many other such parameters while computing its predictions. “Machine learning enables the algorithm to learn from mistakes and corrects itself to improve accuracy of the predictions. The more it predicts, better it gets. As the ticket confirmation chances may vary from a holiday/weekend to a normal day, we maintain ticketing trends for holidays/weekends separately and predict based on that. The overall accuracy of predictions is over 90%,” analytically expresses Vaidya.

“Prediction can only help in planning, but may not give you a confirmed ticket,” further explained Kotha. “For someone who is having a high waitlist number may not necessarily get a confirmed ticket. Sometimes, no quota can get a traveler confirmed tickets. So, we have built algorithms which are smart enough to unlock all the hidden and best available travel options to reach the users’ destination by effectively utilizing the inventory of buses and trains. When no direct tickets are available, ConfirmTkt Alternates looks for vacant seats by exploring unused quota of seats on the same train from other stations. When all quotas of seats are occupied on a train then it looks for vacant seats on other trains on the route and suggests alternate options of booking tickets on two different trains, or a combination of train and bus to reach the destination,” details Kotha.

By June 2015, ConfirmTkt reached a comfortable phase and showed its mettle in attracting external investors to be part of the company. Kotha and Vaidya received funding in two rounds: an angel investment that was led by Pravin Agarwala, ex-VP and Global Head with SAP Labs India and a second round of funding in January 2016. In the second round, the company raised $250,000 from Venture Catalysts and a bunch of other investors including Anirudh Damani, Urrshila Kerkar, Anand Ladsariya, Apoorv Ranjan Sharma and Sanjay Mehta. The funds have primarily been used towards developing and improvising the product.

“Our product is still evolving. ConfirmTkt started with a goal to stop anyone from postponing his journey just because he cannot get a ticket. We are solving it using technology. We will add lot of features to the app which will help us in achieving the goal. Prediction, same train alternates, multi-train, multi-mode are some features planned for incorporation and improvisation. Along with the search option, we would also like our users to complete the transaction in the app itself. We are working on enabling that,” says Kotha when questioned on his future roadmap.

As ConfirmTkt’s users look forward to additional features, Kotha and Vaidya are steadily implementing additional features that may further ease the user’s quest to get a confirmed ticket. They are striving hard to deploy the available funds to meet user demands and are also cautious to stay ahead in the niche space that they have occupied in the travel industry.