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The bus travel segment, pegged at Rs 12,000 crore, did not have an online
presence until recently. Redbus.in has tapped into the largely unexplored and
fragmented bus travel industry, giving it a structured online identity. Like all
innovations, RedBus too has a very interesting story.
The Prologue...
The founders of Redbus used to work in Bangalore with top IT MNCsIBM, Texas
Instruments and Honeywell. During Diwali, one of the founders, Phaninder Sama
and the present CEO faced a lot of problems in booking a bus ticket to his
hometown, as they were all sold out minutes before he reached the travel agent.
Thats when he thought of the possibility of providing consumers the convenience
of booking a bus ticket over the Internet.
Soon Sama and his friends decided to take the plunge and explore this as a
formal business. They met with various peoplebus operators, consumers and
venture capitalists, to gauge how well the concept would work. Once they
received a favorable response, they began writing the code for the software and
presented it to TiE, Bangalore Chapter.
When the team finished building the software code in August 2006, its focus
was to automate the bus operators and make available that inventory to the
partners and resellers.
But when the team approached the bus operators with the software they were
hesitant to deploy it. So Redbus actually started mimicking the bus operators
operations at the back-end. Initially, the website began functioning like
another agent by blocking 10-20% seats on various buses, uploaded the inventory
onto the website so that its available to consumers. In a few months, the word
of mouth strategy worked in favor of the portal also.
..The Epilogue
The site has a lot of unique selling points such as the selection of seats,
information on all departure points in a given city, information on the route,
ticket rates depending on the departure points, home delivery of tickets, access
to best in class operators, and the choice of booking over the phone, mobile,
the Internet, or in person at the partner outlets. One of the most significant
advantages is the booking of return tickets from the place of departure, which
is otherwise not possible.
The company has grown organically by opening offices in six key metros, and
inorganically through its partnerships. Today, Redbus has partnered with about
300 bus operators and has operations in 15 states across 4,000 locations. It has
also partnered with the Uttar Pradesh State Bus Transport and the Indian Postal
Department.
Today, it boasts of a huge distribution network of 35,000 outlets. It also
powers a lot of travel portal such as Makemytrip, Yatra.com, Cleartrip.com,
Easygo.com, Thomas Cook, etc. Redbus has also gone ahead to provide services on
the mobile platform in partnership with Ngpay and mChek. To expand the network
of physical outlets, the portal has tied up with Subhiksha stores, City Cyber
Cafes and Oxygen for bus ticket booking and distribution.
Redbus back-end infrastructure has been evolving at a rapid pace. Today, all
the Redbus offices are interconnected through the VPN network and the data is
housed across ten servers hosted in the US by GoDaddy. To integrate its large
network of partners and distributors, it is now looking at implementing ERP and
CRM tools. It is also moving all its office applications from Microsoft to open
source Linux to make it more scalable while optimizing costs.
As a strategic move, it has established distributed BPOs and voice operations
in every location where it has set up an office to ensure last mile service.
Going forward, Redbus is looking at making its applications more robust on the
open source platform. It is also looking at partnering with Tally to provide a
common accounting and inventory application to the operators.
Priya Kekre
priyak@cybermedia.co.in
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