After Flights Its Bus Ticketing thats Ready to Take Off!
We had recently blogged about how flight ticketing was getting plagued by cases of cyber crime primarily due to the high volumes of ticketing transactions that were happening online for booking flights. Both Air and Rail ticketing have taken off in a big way and the testimony to that is the fact that 82.5% of the total airline bookings happen through the net.
So its not a surprise that bus ticketing is also catching up. A large part of the inter India travel takes place through buses and trains and though the Irctc has done a great job with rail ticketing, In the bus ticketing segment the same has still not happened. Mainly due to fragmented bus travel players. I had known of Rajnationalexpress which has its own bus booking site since over a year now and we had also blogged about redbus another player in this scene.
But in this article a list of new players like Tickevala.com, Theluxurybuses.com, Abhibus.com, Indiabusticket.com and Checkouttrip.com are mentioned which are catering to the same upcoming space of bus ticketing. It also mentions the fact that this space to be growing at 30% at year on year. Even Online travel players like yatra and makemytrip who started with flight ticketing are looking to diversify into bus ticketing. Makemytrip’s CMO has also been quoted as saying that Makemytrip itself is looking to buyout interesting startups in the bus ticketing space.
All in all it does look like bus ticketing is set to take off in India. What needs to be seen though is the margins that these bus ticketing players would be making on each ticket. I guess inorder to sustain on a longterm basis volumes of transactions have to far exceed airline and even train ticketing. So reaching out to the common middle class junta would be of prime importance. I guess marketing efforts could include internet kiosks at strategic locations and ads on rickshaws which could be a smarter way of reaching out to the target audience.
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hey guys if ur in mumbai these coolyatra.com people are pretty good.afcourse they have not yet started with their online payment transactions which they are going to start soon.they have got a very strong call center and bus tickets at a very appropriate rate.try them out sometime theire number is 022 25202222.i got stuck one day and they helped me out a lot