While jetting is a possible travel option when travelling from one part of India to another, sometimes you can’t avoid the need for land travel and you are left wondering how do you book India train tickets online. This is my easy guide on finding and booking those train tickets for your upcoming trip to India. Read on for also a short guide on how to book India bus tickets.

Option 1: Book train tickets on IRCTC

Create for yourself an account on IRCTC, India’s Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd. that is officially managing India’s train network bookings. The registration process was straightforward.

Once your account has been created, train bookings can be made via their website.

Previously, I had found bookings via IRCTC to be more expensive as the seats apparently picked from the “Foreign Tourist Quota” instead of the “General Quota”. However, this appears to have been changed. Compared to before, the present website is now more user friendly and you can now select the type of seat quota unlike a few months ago. I would therefore suggest bookings be made directly via the IRCTC website.

 

Option 2: Book train tickets on Cleartrip

Prior to the change in IRCTC’s web design, I would normally recommend travellers use Cleartrip instead. Cleartrip, being something similar to Expedia and other travel booking websites, is user friendly and booking railway tickets through it is a breeze. The only negative comment is that you need both a Cleartrip account and also a IRCTC account to finalise your booking and make payment. The benefit then was that you get cheaper tickets from the “General Quota” than tickets offered on IRCTC.

That all was true until IRCTC’s web design change.

Now, there isn’t much benefit and you may end up paying a slightly higher price as agent fees (40 rupees?). However, cleartrip still offers a good alternative in the event you face problems on IRCTC such that you are unable to book your tickets via IRCTC directly.

Alternative to Trains – How to book buses in India

Sometimes, especially when booking just a few weeks prior to your trip, you get yourself into a difficult spot. You have been wait listed on a popular route. *Horror*

One option is to wait for IRCTC to confirm your seat (i.e. 4 hours prior to departure time). While you can try to comfort yourself knowing that your seat will likely be available by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd (https://indiarailinfo.com/) for a prediction, that feeling of uncertainty is not fun especially when you are on a holiday.

The other option is to book yourself a bus ride to your next destination instead. Buses are cheaper and are actually not bad unlike the image your imagination is creating right now (think overcrowded buses with people hanging on for dear life). The bus I travelled on was comfortable and no different from any tour bus that I have sat on previously.

 

If you are booking buses for travel within the Golden Triangle (Delhi – Agra – Jaipur), consider using this official website (https://rsrtconline.rajasthan.gov.in). The tour agent who did the Agra-Jaipur booking for me used this site and I managed to “reverse engineer” the booking process by looking at the ticket confirmation provided to me.   

Where possible, avoid using tour agencies in India. No matter how good their reviews are on tripadvisor, the impression I got from my experience was that they way overcharge their handling fees (in my case, the handling fee was close to 90% of the bus ticket!).

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