DON8217;T MISS THIS BUS

Now you can book and pay for bus tickets online, even choose an aisle seat

Booking a flight or buying a train ticket has never been this easy: go online, select a fare, pay with your credit card and it8217;s done. But when it comes to buses, commuters are faced with a mass of confusion. There are different boarding points, the fares keep changing and local travel agents don8217;t offer tickets for a bus that suits you.

8220;It was Diwali in 2006 and all my flat mates had gone home. I was desperately trying to find a bus that would take me home to Hyderabad, but there just wasn8217;t any,8221; says Phanindra Sama, director of Pilani Soft labs. After hours of calling up travel agents, all he had was a list of numbers and no tickets. 8220;That8217;s when I decided I should share the travel agents8217; numbers with everybody over the Internet,8221; says Sama.

So he got together two friends, Charan and Sudhhakar, and over the weekends, the three MNC employees started building a software to help people find buses that suited them. 8220;At that point, we didn8217;t think we would quit our jobs. It was just a weekend project,8221; he adds.

The project resulted in a site, Redbus.in, dedicated to booking bus tickets. It started from Bangalore, has grown all the way to Delhi, and is the only bus-ticketing agency that also offers return tickets.

8220;We didn8217;t want people to physically go and get the ticket. So now they can pay online and get an e-ticket or have it delivered to their homes for only Rs 20,8221; says Sama.

But getting the bus provider to cooperate wasn8217;t easy. 8220;We said we would fill their buses by using technology, but they just wouldn8217;t believe us,8221; he says. So Redbus offered to fill 20 per cent seats that usually went vacant. The gamble worked; today the site gets 1 lakh hits and books at least 500 tickets a day; bus providers are eager to register with it.

There were other problems8212;most ticketing agents didn8217;t know which tickets were for window, aisle or middle seats. They also favoured one bus carrier over the other and would offer tickets only for those buses. 8220;So we decided to include the layout of every bus to choose and get the seat you want. We also added the schedule for every bus,8221; he adds.

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The site is a godsend for Delhiites. 8220;In Delhi, buying a ticket is a major problem. There is no organisation; you have to go to many places to buy a single ticket. There are standard fares but you just can8217;t tell which bus is available,8221; says Sama.

The service isn8217;t restricted to the Internet; people can buy tickets over phone. 8220;We chose to call our site Redbus because most government buses down south are red and colours are easy to remember. Now we plan to go national with our service,8221; he adds.