Travel ticket reservation through Mobile Phones and Cloud Computing

Advancement in technology has even contributed on going green initiative. Online ticket reservation is the quite older known technology and the recent addition to the list is paperless technology. We are used to booking ticket online and taking print out on paper. Online reservation technology has reduced the long standing queues in front of reservation counters. But has made huge queue on internet web servers to book ticket online, without the capacity of handling huge reservation requests, web servers also hang many times.

The problem of server busy in online reservation system has another story too, the servers and the online system will be purchased or outsourced through the tender process. The person bidding for the least amount will get the tender, at low price how can he provide good quality even keeping his share of profit. Authorities should re-think on tender process and should also include minimum quality standards (keeping in mind the growth of popularity and traffic to website over the years) while issuing the tender notification.

Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) has introduced reservation through mobile phone recently. There is no specialty in it, as it has online reservation facility earlier itself. But the reservation done through mobile phone doesn’t require print-out of the ticket booked. The sms sent to the user after successfully reserving the ticket serves as ticket and no need of taking the print out of the same. It saves the paper to a greater extent as ticket print out is taken usually on A4 size paper and may be a few thousand print outs are taken every day. Red Bus has implemented mobile ticket or sms ticket and has gained much popularity.

Railway ticket reservation is mainly done through online now a days and only a few will have reservation done through railway counters. If the provision to do railway ticket reservation through mobile phone and sms tickets are considered equivalent to hard copy of ticket, it also saves tons of paper per day. The challenge with the sms ticket or mobile ticket is the sms should be delivered within time to the customers without any delay.

A good solution to tackle the problem with sever loading or hanging is to use the cloud computing. Cloud computing also has an unique feature of hiring extra servers whenever required, paying only for the extra usage. Whenever the load or request for booking tickets is more extra usage feature can be utilized and can be abandoned whenever load is within the capacity of existing servers. It not only provides better service to customers but also reduces the complaints of server slow response, payment delays or similar technical glitches.