Baffling website of IRCTC

The official website of INDIAN RAILWAY CATERING AND TOURISM CORPORATION [ A Govt. of India Enterprise ] is completely hopeless. From nowhere, it appears to be a country website. Almost everyone who has visited this website and tried using it for online ticket booking would be knowing how hassling it is to get one single ticket booked from this website.

First of all, from layman’s point of view, you never know, when you will be shown an error message on website, washing all your hard-work and time spent in the process of booking a ticket. Here is the usual error message which will be coming to every user of this website who is using latest version of Internet Explorer i.e. IE 7. First of all, you go to plan my travel screen, enter Source and Destination stations along-with the Class and select e-ticket option. A list of trains is displayed to you and you select a desired train. Then you proceed to ext screen where you enter personal details and the identity card details. When you click on the Go button to go to the third screen, Internet Explorer shows you an error message saying that The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority. Here is the screenshot –

So a government website hasn’t even a proper security certificate which means any novice hacker can hack this website!

You can click on Continue to this website (not recommended) in order to proceed but you never know, your bank account details will be with a hacker.

The Communication Failure error is quite popular with this website and keeps appearing now and then.

On the technical aspect, this website is using age old technologies and at any point of time, you can get error like this which I got sometime today –

 So they don’t have even the proper error messages on display.

Now, the most crucial part is when you make payment by logging in to your bank website and the money is deducted. After that, when you are redirected to the irctc website and all of sudden, you get error message – Page cannot be displayed. I come across this situation once in at least 3 times. You can’t do anything. Your money for ticket is gone and you didn’t get the ticket. After 4-5 days, your money is returned to your bank account after shredding out the transaction charges. I had explained the hidden charges in online IRCTC ticket booking in my other post.

So, this is our great Indian Railway Corporation (in native words) website which promises you a safe journey but not a good ticket booking experience :roll:.