RM has taken the right step.
• It is not easy to be-fool an intelligent person like our current RM is. Every body know that the seats/berths in the premium trains are going vacant just because of the 50% surcharge imposed by the flexifare scheme and IR officials are the biggest beneficiaries as they can easily get seat in the otherwise very popular trains at the eleventh hour. Or probably the advisors usually travel by air and are not very much connected to or had real experience of rail travel.
• Time period considered for...
more... comparing the data of earnings is erratic. In 2015-16 first half of the year (Apr-Sep) was without flexifares and only the second half of the year was riddled with flexifares. If we consider advance booking period of 4 months, i.e. people who booked advance tickets for next 4 months at the time of announcement of the flexifare scheme (Sep-Dec’16), we can say that about 60-65% of seats were booked before the announcement of flexifare policy. So 2015-16 does not depict the real picture of pre flexifare era. 4 months before and 4 months after the announcement of flexifare scheme is overlapping period and may give inaccurate indications hence should not be considered for comparision. Only after 1.1.17 does all the pax booked tickets knowing about the flexifare policy, rest might have paid the flexi-surcharge during their journey.
• Most important criteria to judge the success of flexifare scheme is compare class wise % occupancy of premium trains, before and after the announcement of flexifare policy. Many flexifare trains introduced after sep’16 have added a large number of seats/ berths under flexifare, which has not been accounted in above analysis.
• Partonage of premium trains before flexifare was rapidly growing resulting in increase in frequencies and coach augmentation. The data of no. of paxs. and revenue generated by the premium trains in last few years i.e. 2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15 is likely to show huge annual growth in number of pax. as well as in revenue. I guess the annual growth rate in no. of paxs. in premium trains may be around 10% and in revenue may be about 15-20%. Had there been no flexifare policy, the premium trains could have given about 15-30% more revenue as compared to what they are giving today and as usual the premium train would have run with long waiting lists.
• Approx. 10% annual increase in the revenue achieved is just like normal annual increase or even lesser than the normal revenue increase without the flexifares. If the occupancy of flexifare trains remain the same, the revenue jump would have been about 30-35% due to flexifares only and an additional jump due to more flexifare trains/coaches introduced after sep’16. Flexifare has put a sudden brake on the rising popularity and patronage of the premium trains and has to be done away with, if IR want to run more and more fully ac high speed trains throughout the network and earn more.
• In a nutshell the report is totally misleading and rightly thrown to dustbin by the RM.
