E-Commerce India - Bus ticket booking is easy but not the road travel

There are endless reasons for people to travel all the time. I guess one of the reasons that there existed many joint families earlier is the daunting task of travel once in a while. Making travel arrangements for two-way journey and accommodation would take more than one person or family. Things cannot be planned much earlier and advanced booking was a novel concept.  With kids, baggage and the fear of losing either of them, getting seats for travel must have been  troublesome.

One has the luxury of realizing travel plans as much in advance as possible these days. The Road Transport Corporation (RTC) in India has certainly increased and also improved the quality of buses traveling across the country. As there is more demand than the supply, private bus companies have mushroomed. There is always a rush to book tickets for a long week-end and during festival season. Redbus has seized the opportunity and built a travel site to book bus tickets. Makemytrip has started flight ticket bookings way back in 1999. Travelling by flight must have been a privilege of 1%, while travelling by bus is known to 99% of people in India. From that perspective, it looks ridiculous as to why no one thought about bus ticket booking online earlier !

Pure vertical (bus tickets in this case) e-commerce players always specialize in their domain and offer good service. If one looks at http://redbus.in, they can see umpteen trivial features which add up to convenience of the end user.

1. Show the pictures and videos of a bus class in which you can book tickets

2. Indicate whether movies are shown, water bottle & blanket are given and charging points available

3. Number of seats available with specific mention about window seats
4. AC or Non-AC bus indicator
5. Ratings given by the members on bus quality, punctuality and staff behavior

6. Capability to book the tickets from mobile and also travel with an SMS ticket on mobile (paperless)

7. Can book through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system over phone

What more does one need to conveniently book a bus ticket? Their site talks about booking 8 million tickets till date. That is a good number for a company of about 6 years old (for a perspective, both facebook and indian mobile subscribers have about 900 million subscribers).

One also needs to know that redbus can book tickets only with private bus operators. State RTCs have their own sites for bus ticket booking. Even some of the private bus operators have their own sites for bus booking. Managing the inventory of seats in a bus is not an easy task. It must be interesting to note that there are other bus ticket travel sites like http://travelyaari.com, http://makemytrip.com and even http://via.com which have not become so popular for different reasons.

While the travel planning through buses has really become easier, how about the roads on which these buses are supposed to travel? They are getting better but the pace does not match the growth of travel planning sites !