As the festive season commences across the country, travellers across the country are back to actively making advance bookings for travel in the near future. Goibibo, India’s leading online travel brand is already seeing a ~40% increase in travel bookings for the coming months. As traveller traffic returns in a big way, Goibibo has launched a gamut of new features including Price Lock for flight bookers and most recently, goCONFIRMED Trip for train bookers to help customers make smart choices and value-based decisions when planning and booking travel.
goCONFIRMED Trip, a one-of-a-kind feature has been designed to offer more choices, convenience and increased value to customers when booking a train journey on the platform. The feature allows travellers to discover and book last-minute alternate travel and financing options for flight, cab or bus tickets in case the train ticket remains unconfirmed after chart preparation. By opting for the feature, train bookers will be able to seek a guaranteed 3X value back against the unconfirmed ticket, and upgrade and substitute to a fresh booking through flight, cab, bus or an alternate train journey for a future date.
Commenting on the new features that have been rolled out to make the process of booking a train journey comfortable and hassle-free for customers, Parikshit Choudhury, Chief Business Officer, Ground Transport at Goibibo shared, “At Goibibo, our constant endeavor is to develop travel solutions that are centered around creating more value and assisting our travellers in making smart travel buying decisions. goCONFIRMED Trip is a step towards ensuring that our train users get to undertake the intended journey despite all uncertainties by empowering them with more travel options and flexibility to book as per convenience. The biggest differentiator of this new feature is the 3X value back vouchers for an unconfirmed ticket thus, easing financial woes associated with paying for an expensive last-minute alternate booking through flight, cab etc.”
Apart from goCONFIRMED Trip, Goibibo has rolled out a few other offerings to improve the probability of getting a confirmed train reservation thereby, making the process of train booking easy and seamless for its customers. One of these new offerings includes Cluster Search option that allows a customer to search and explore more train options, in case the preferred trains are running full, from stations within 60 kms of range from the original boarding point. Another feature, Alternate Station option helps a customer to book a confirmed reservation to the nearest station before or after the de-boarding station.
Recently, Goibibo, an authorised Rail ticket booking partner of IRCTC, also introduced a Free Cancellation policy that allows a passenger to avail a full refund in case the booker cancels the ticket before chart preparation. The policy has been structured to ensure that the booker does not have to pay hefty cancellation fee for confirmed train tickets when cancelled last minute.