Ever since we launched Indian Railways bookings, one of our top requests has been to add support for displaying availability for more than one day at a time. We’re thrilled to oblige–the train search now returns availability for upto 6 days with one click.
As soon as you click the “check availability” button, availability is displayed for your preferred date of travel. If there’s no availability for your date or you just want to see availability for the next few days, there is a text link available ‘Next few days.’ Clicking the ‘Next few days’ link instantly displays train availability for upto 5 more days. To book, just select the date and availability that suits you most and click the ‘Book’ button to proceed.
As always, General and Tatkal availability are checked automatically for travel within 5 days. The availability status is now colour coded to make it easier to recognise. There are three status levels for availability:
- AVL: Available
- WL: Waitlisted
- RAC: Reservation against cancellation
We hope you like the new addition to the train search results. We think the feature is a huge convenience for people whose dates are flexible as they can book an alternative date without having to do an entirely new search.
Happy chug chugging.
Hi,
Was just wondering how come there is no availability for any train that I have searched on any date under Tatkal?
For me it looks like the Tatkal option on Cleartrip Train Search exists only for cosmetic purpose.
You may check it for yourself. I would love to see a screenshot with Tatkal option for any train on any date showing seats available.
Regards,
Roshni
I have booked tatkal tickets on cleartrip earlier. Why don’t you check in irctc also? If there is a discrepancy it is a recently introduced bug
of course, I checked it. and it was available. in fact i have just booked a ticket. Thanks.
Roshni–could you please let us know what search there was a mismatch with the IRCTC site for by posting to our trains forum:
http://www.cleartrip.com/forums/43
Nice. Almost a day late. I am going to book today.
I’ve always wondered why its just the next few days.. what about the previous few days? Can’t we have a simple option like flight search that shows the previous 3 and next 3 days?
Dhruv–the number of days for which we get data back from the Railway servers is not fixed, sometimes it’s 6 days and sometimes it’s fewer. That’s why we worded it the way we did.
Also, availability data is only returned for subsequent days, not previous days, making the previous 3 days data difficult to fetch.
It would be even more useful if you extended this feature to the "Class of Travel" as well. Almost always one would like to see the status of 3AC if SL is spilling into waitlists, and 2AC if 3AC is.
And then as phase three, combine the two somehow along with other information for the Holy Grail of train booking sites – a calendar view which would show what class has confirmed/RAC tickets available on which dates (restriced to +/- N days from the chosen travel date) on what trains.
On the side, try to provide information on connecting services as well (HYB-MAS is fully booked on all three direct trains? Try HYB-BZA connecting to BZA-MAS).