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Journalism of Courage
Booking a flight or buying a train ticket has never been this easy: go online, select a fare, pay with your credit card and it’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 don’t offer tickets for a bus that suits you.
“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 wasn’t any,” 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. “That’s when I decided I should share the travel agents’ numbers with everybody over the Internet,” 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. “At that point, we didn’t think we would quit our jobs. It was just a weekend project,” 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.
“We didn’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,” says Sama.
But getting the bus provider to cooperate wasn’t easy. “We said we would fill their buses by using technology, but they just wouldn’t believe us,” 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 problems—most ticketing agents didn’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. “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,” he adds.
The site is a godsend for Delhiites. “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 can’t tell which bus is available,” says Sama.
The service isn’t restricted to the Internet; people can buy tickets over phone. “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,” he adds.
