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I'm trying to book a ticket a month in advance with a foreign credit/debit card. All the existing options do not work. The system says:

All international Debit/Credit cards can also be used for ticket booking through 'International Cards (Powered by ATOM)'.

but ATOM is not even in the list:

enter image description here

What do I do? Is it a typical/temporary issue?

Arulkumar
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Sparkler
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2 Answers2

11

This must be a glitch. Wait for sometime and try again. The ATOM option is available to me.

IRCTC payment option - Credit cards

If this option is not available to you for a long time. Try the following workaround.
  1. Transfer the cash required from your credit card to a wallet service like Paytm, Mobikwik, etc...
  2. While paying in IRCTC select the option Cash card/Wallets.
  3. Choose the Paytm/Mobikwik/any other wallet. IRCTC payment - Cash card/Wallet option
    Note: All the Cash cards/wallet except Mobikwik requires a phone number starting with +91 i.e) in India. So Mobikwik is the best and only option at the time of writing.
4

For future people. I struggled with IRCTC for hours trying to pay with a foreign card and failed. I tried 12go and it worked but they charged a R800 fee for a R500 ticket :P Cleartrip has worked in the past but they billed me and no ticket (I am confident of a refund).

But then I found the trick with paying in IRCTC via Atom. It is so damned counter-intuitive...but once cracked, it is easy.

Step through the booking process until you come to the review booking page that looks like this

enter image description here

Click on Multiple Payment Service and you get this

enter image description here

And you are away. It took me 8 hours of frustration to get my first booking because the obvious place to click was debit card with PIN. Once I worked this out it took about 30 minutes to do 4 more bookings.

The next challenge is the Indian railway system itself :P

Steve
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