In an effort to better serve bus travellers, the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) has made online advance booking easier through a new feature. It has also fully revamped its website.
Booking tickets on the website is just three steps away through the ‘Any Where Any Time Advance Reservation’ system or AWATAR 2.1. The system also has an automatic refund feature whereby the bank account of a user will be credited in case the ticket is cancelled or the transaction fails. Officials said the new version was on a par with the online booking process of private bus operators. The state-run transport corporation has also updated the feature on its official mobile app and customers can book tickets immediately.
Explaining the new feature, an official in the KSRTC said the application was hosted on a private cloud server that helped it to handle customer booking requests during peak hour by increasing the number of virtual servers. With this, the ability to handle concurrent requests has been increased to 8,000 from the earlier 5,000.
Officials also said that they were already seeing the impact of the change and the load had greatly increased since the changes were introduced. They also claimed that the initiative had been appreciated by regular users of the KSRTC service.
Rajender Kumar Kataria, Managing Director, KSRTC, said that he was hopeful that advance bookings would go up further as the initial response was good. After the website’s revamp, the average number of bookings has touched 25,000-30,000 seats per day. It was earlier 20,000-25,000 bookings, he said.
Currently, online booking is available for 2,400 buses, including 600 premium AC, 350 Rajahamsa, 250 non-AC and 1,200 Karnataka Sarige buses. The number of buses will be increased as per demand, Kumar said.
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