Travel aggregator redBus has called upon State-owned bus operators to open up their services for booking apps, saying this would unlock greater revenue for state road transport corporations (RTCs).
States like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which have some of the largest inter- and intra-state bus operations in India, have pulled back from easy online bookings.
“Online penetration for RTCs is hovering between 5–30%,” CEO Prakash Sangam told The Hindu in an interview. “There is clearly an opportunity” to improve the portion of their businesses that is available for online purchase, Mr. Sangam said. He added that 23 firms had tied up with redBus, but there remained a lot of digitisation potential. For RTC bookings, the firm makes money through commissions that are comparable with other travel and ticketing agents with whom RTCs work.
Mr. Sangam outlined two reasons why RTCs were not completely distributing online. “One is, their technology systems may not be able to handle an external integration.” In other words, making bookings available online through third party ticket providers may be too complex an undertaking. A second reason is that some RTCs may not provide commercial terms to online booking sites that make the exercise worthwhile.
There was also a large portion of services where RTCs improvise — for instance, on some routes, two separate bus services scheduled to leave in short succession may combine the services into one ride due to lower-than-usual demand, complicating advance online reservations for such journeys.
RTCs had seen a surge in the share of bookings that are online, Mr. Sangam said. From a low of 5%, he said, the share was now about 30–35% (redBus accounts for about 40% of this online slice, he said). The importance of digitising inventories was most acute, Mr. Sangam said, for inter-state routes. “People going on intra-State journeys generally know about RTCs,” Mr. Sangam said. “But someone going from, for example, Goa to Bangalore, may not know that these routes exist.”
