Alternative travel solutions enabled by online data – Railofy
Business impact
- Access transportation data re: Indian railway network
- Predict railway and airline congestion levels
- Set effective pricing
About the company
Railofy is an early-stage travel tech startup trying to solve the Indian railway congestion problem. In India, the demand/supply gap is huge when it comes to railway travel. While railway capacity is growing, population rates are growing at faster speeds, so the demand will always be greater than the supply. One in every two people who buy a railway ticket in India is waitlisted at the time of booking – Railofy enables those waitlisted passengers to get to their desired destinations at the cheapest price possible. When passengers purchase a ticket and are put on a waitlist, they are able to purchase Railofy’s travel protection product – if their railway ticket doesn’t get confirmed at the time of departure, Railofy sends them on a flight for a similar cost of the railway ticket. Typically, a flight would cost three times the price of a train ticket.
The Challenge
Railofy was challenged in being able to access enough of the right kinds of public online data to feed its pricing algorithm, in order to set its pricing effectively.
The Solution
Railofy chose Bright Data’s Data Center IPs and Residential IPs as well as the Bright Data Proxy Manager in order to access the kinds of public online data it needs – prices of flights, flight options, number of seats available, etc in order to analyze the complex railway network in India, predict both the railway and airline congestion levels and set prices accordingly. Bright Data has a big pool of Indian proxy IPs, which allows rotating IPs as much as needed.
The Outcome
With Bright Data’s Data Center IPs, Residential IPs and Proxy Manager, and the public online data it’s now able to collect, Railofy is able to get an all-round view of India’s railway network, foresee congestion levels, and set effective pricing systems. With the success of its first product rollout, Railofy now plans to become the largest brand in the Indian Railways space and to become the household brand for anything to do with railways including tickets, food, entertainment, etc.
“Our experience with Bright Data has been excellent. In terms of downtime or outages, if there are any, there’s very proactive communication, and it’s only ever for very short periods of time. It fits our needs perfectly.” Hrishabh Sanghvi – Co-Founder and CTO of Railofy