Indian Railways train.
Sharell Cook
There's nothing like trying to reserve a ticket on Indian Railways as a source of frustration. Issues with the Internet reservation system, and failed bookings, are common.
But now, it seems that a new problem has emerged. Indian Railways is no longer accepting international credit cards on Internet bookings. A reader from the UK recently found this out the hard way after spending more than seven hours trying to complete his reservation. In the end, a 30 minute phone call to the helpline in Delhi revealed that international credit cards could no longer be used.
This thread on the Indiamike.com forums also indicates that people have had little success with using their international credit cards lately. Of course, as with most things in India, the situation isn't so clear cut through. This information about accepted payments on the IRCTC website conflicts with this IRCTC FAQ about payments, which says that using AXIS payment gateway is still an option.
So, what's the alternative? Cleartrip.com has a very user-friendly online reservation system. Or, you can still use American Express.
Have you experienced any issues when trying to make an Indian Railways reservation? Share your frustration with other readers here.
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As it looks today (jan -11) NO international cards are accepted, so we can forget paying Indian train tickets over the Net:
https://www.irctc.co.in/payment.html
Correction: Sorry, Amex is accepted!
I think International Credit Cards are always accepted. Let me explain. Please go to this page: https://www.irctc.co.in/payment.html. All payment options are listed.
Under the line “Payment by Credit Cards”, you can see five gateways. The first three have a comment “(Not International Credit Cards)”, so they don’t support International Credit Cards. However, the fourth gateway (CITI PG) doesn’t have such comment. It’s implying that the CITI PG gateway DOES support International Credit Cards.
Since I need to book a few tickets, I have a chance to verify this. I just booked successfully this morning, and paid by International Visa Credit Card. It was fast and easy.
Note: When making payment, select the right gateway (CITI PG), and Visa Cards will go through Visa Verfiy process.
Hope this information helpful.
Thanks so much Forest. I will be booking some tickets myself soon, so it’s really useful to know. Quite a few people reported International credit cards not being accepted at one point, so they might have changed the rules again (perhaps their revenue went down!).
Yes! I successfully managed to book my tickets too. Thanks for the tip!
About the International Credit cards…was the card you used a Visa card? I tried many times last year with my Mastercard and had no success, whereas the year before I had no problems. These days I book tickets through the Cleartrip website but this is a problem when you want to book Taktal tickets as you can’t get access to the tickets until 9am after they’ve been on sale for one hour, so it’s very hard to get a ticket. To be able to use the IRCTC website for Taktal tickets would be great because then they are available at 8am when the site opens for business.
Hey guys
I tried to register for an account at the reservation website. However, it needed a mobile verification number for which they only allowed me to enter an Indian number (beginning with +91). How did you guys get around this? Many thanks for your help!
Hi Terence, I think you will find that the mobile number is only necessary if you want to receive updates to your phone or something. Did you try leaving it blank? Shouldn’t be a problem. Do let me know.