Is your money deducted from bank account and yet ticket is not booked while doing online railway reservation on IRCTC?

Many users have complained that when they were doing train ticket booking on irctc.co.in, at the time of payment, when they completed the payment and checked back they could not find their train ticket online.

What happened to the ticket? Is my ticket booked? If not, what will happen to my money? How can I get my money back? Do I need to do something to get my money refunded or is it a loss? All these are genuine questions asked by worried customers who don't know what to do.

Don't panic. Your money is safe.

To know how you will get back your money (in case ticket is not booked) or whether or not Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has received money and will do booking of your train, read article in full.

Users needs to understand that no website out there is perfect. But website www.irctc.co.in is one of the best e-commerce sites out there. They are handling and booking something like 24000 tickets per minute. It has been around for many years now and has earned the respect of online users as one of the best websites for doing online railway reservation.

So, trust them to have measures in place to safeguard the hard earned money of users. It is for a good reason they are called as 'next generation eTicketing system'.

The situation where money is debited but ticket not booked arises due to certain complexities involved during online payment process. Lets understand what causes this situation to materialize, before learning how this problem can be solved.

The online payment at IRCTC involves complex system of technical and telecommunication networking integration between customer’s Internet bandwidth, IT system of banks and payment gateways and is dependent on internet connectivity across various constituents. Any failure or delay in this complex network may cause transaction failure before completion.

Just have a look at how a typical payment gateway works.

money deducted from bank
payment gateway working

Now that you know the cause of problem, it's time to get solution.

Luckily the solution already exists. As it is mentioned earlier that we can trust IRCTC to have concrete measures in place to safeguard the user interests. 

First of all you need to login to your account and go to profile section. There you'll see "My Transactions" section. You will see one of the two status messages shown below. The action taken depends upon the status message.

  1.  Payment settled but ticket not booked:  the main reason for this situation is network failure. You make payment from bank, see that payment is successful and just after that your internet connection is disconnected resulting in a network failure. Other reason could be that the passenger opted for particular berth at the time of booking (by choosing the options like book my ticket only if lower berth is available etc), now when berth of choice is not available, ticket is not booked. In this case, IRCTC credit back the amount to the respective bank the next day. The bank then credits back the amount within 2-3 working days in account through which booking was done.
  2. Payment settlement failed and ticket not booked: this happens due to system or network failure at bank's end or at Payment Gateway (PG) end before remitting ticket amount to IRCTC. In this case amount is not credited to IRCTC account. The money remains with the bank which it refunds after due verification.
It should be clear now that in no scenario user should be worried about the loss of money. If you feel a bit restless you can always send mail to care@irctc.co.in or contact at customer care numbers:
Delhi 011-39340000, Chennai 044-25300000.

You can also avoid the situation entirely by passing the payment gateway. This is explained in our extremely popular article how to do fast tatkal booking using irctc ewallet.

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