Uber Adds Train Ticket Booking In India With ixigo

Uber partners ixigo to add train ticket booking to the Uber app in India

Uber has added train ticket booking to its India app through a partnership with ixigo, launched on 18 August, letting riders book rail tickets, check PNR status and arrange rides to and from stations in one place.

Launched: 18 August 2026, in the Uber India app under "Bus & Train"
Partner: ixigo, operated by Le Travenues Technology, founded 2007 by Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar
Scale of the category: Indian Railways carried 741 crore passengers in FY2025-26
Uber India: present in more than 225 cities; multimodal line-up now spans Moto, Auto, Cars, Metro, Intercity Cars, Intercity Buses and train tickets
ixigo reports more than 57 crore annual active users in FY2026
Spokespeople: Arnab Kumar, Uber director for business development India and South Asia; Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, ixigo

Uber Is Buying Reasons To Open The App

A ride-hailing app has a structural weakness: it is only opened when someone needs a ride, which is a handful of times a month for most users. Every service added to it is an attempt to fix that.

Train ticketing is a good instrument for it. A rail booking happens days or weeks before travel, is checked repeatedly through PNR status, and generates two rides at either end. So one purchase creates several visits and two pieces of core revenue, which is a much better loop than a bus or metro ticket delivers.

The Numbers Explain Both Sides

741 crore rail passengers a year is a category no consumer platform in India can be indifferent to. Arnab Kumar framed the case in terms of the whole journey:

"Train journeys are an integral part of how India travels. For millions of people, the journey starts well before they board the train and continues long after they arrive at their destination."

For ixigo the logic runs the other way. Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar described the partnership as extending ixigo's travel experience beyond the train, from doorstep to final destination. A booking platform gets distribution inside an app that already has the user's payment details and location, which is a cheaper route to a customer than buying one.

What This Means For Marketers

The useful read for anyone planning media is what it does to intent data. An app that knows you have booked a Tuesday train to Secunderabad knows your travel window, your destination and your likely spending pattern, with far more precision than a generic travel-intent segment.

Uber already operates dedicated pickup and drop-off zones at stations including Ahmedabad, Secunderabad and Howrah, with more planned. Combining that physical footprint with ticket-level knowledge of who is going where is a genuinely valuable advertising asset, whether or not either company chooses to sell it that way.