Gurgaon-based ixigo launches PNR prediction for Indian Railways

Indian mobile travel marketplace ixigo has launched a PNR prediction feature for train travellers. The ‘ixigo trains & hotels’ tab in the app will now get PNR confirmation predictions in addition to the market-leading information, search & planning tools for train travellers. For any given train’s wait-listed status, ixigo is be able to show the near accurate probability with which the ticket will get confirmed. This allows travellers to decide whether or not to book a ticket on a waiting list. The PNR prediction feature also shows the probability of getting your ticket confirmed if you have booked it already. In addition to the PNR prediction feature, ixigo’s trains & hotels app includes other features such as budget hotel bookings, cab bookings, packages, station alarms, platform numbers and coach positions of trains. In a significant boost for ixigo’s mobile strategy, Micromax has recently made a strategic investment in the business. Talking about the new feature, Rajnish Kumar, co­-founder & CTO said, “ixigo has always believed in simplifying the lives of travelers and one of the pain areas we wished to solve was to make it easier for train travellers to decide whether they should book a wait-listed seat/berth on a train or not. Over 50,000 PNR status checks and nearly 200,000 train information requests are done on our app every day. This was an interesting big data project and we are happy with the outcome.  Our machine learning algorithms will keep improving the accuracy of the system with every new train PNR tracked inside our apps. We expect to go from the current 90% accuracy to 95% accuracy pretty quickly.”