Passengers with unconfirmed AC-I or AC-II tickets for Rajdhani Express may soon be able to fly to their destination by paying the difference, if any, in the price of the train and air tickets, reports Times of India.
The same was talked about last year when Ashwani Lohani was the Air India chairman. However, he did not get a positive response from the Railways. He said that if AI approaches Railways with this proposal, the latter will accept it.
It must be noted that many passengers end up with unconfirmed AC-I AC-II tickets. As reported earlier, Railways came up with dynamic pricing model in which, only the first 10 per cent of the tickets sold in premium trains will be available at the original listed price.
After that, for every 10 per cent tickets sold, the fare goes up by 10 per cent. However, after the sale of 50 per cent of tickets, when fares are 50 per cent more than the original prices, there is no further hike.
This made air travel and Rajdhani AC tickets fare almost similar, prompting passengers to opt for air travel. Lohani himself was not very happy with the dynamic pricing system which earned the Railways an additional Rs 240 crore.
“I personally was not happy with the way dynamic pricing has been structured. We have to really look at the way airlines are doing it,” Lohani said in an interview.
Lohani had earlier used his experience with the railways to solve AI’s low aircraft occupancy problem. Around the same time that he came up with the train-air switch idea, AI had also decided to match Rajdhani AC-II fares on important metro routes like Delhi to Mumbai, Times of India reported.
