Come holidays and you have your backpacks ready. Be it to the hometown or some exotic destination, the romance in travel is always by the road. But wait for the holiday season and chances are that you miss the last ticket to fun by a minute or so.
Booking a bus ticket is now easy, thanks to three engineers graduated from BITS Pilani. Meet Phanindra Sama (Phani), Sudhakar Paspunuri (Su) and Charan Padmaraju (Charan), the brain behind redBus.in, an online ticket booking service. With Abey as the Head of Business Development and Mayank as the Head of Marketing, the core management team has five active members now.
All the members were working for various IT companies in Bangalore before they midwifed this little bus. They say like all innovations, this one too has a story to tell. It starts with one of the members losing a ticket to his hometown at the very last minute and ends with the idea of an online booking facility taking shape. The idea was compelling from the start and was powered by the reality that nobody has done this anywhere in India before.
The friends met with various people – bus operators, consumers and venture capitalists – to understand the feasibility of such a concept. They got a favourable response. They started writing the code for the software that would be required to run the operations. Once this was ready, they put together a business plan and presented it to TiE – The Indus Entrepreneurs – Bangalore Chapter. Once TiE was impressed with the idea, the only thing left for the redBus was to hit the road.
From the initial days of struggle, redBus has come a long way. Now, they reach out to customers irrespective of the medium they use — be it the internet, phone, home delivery, physical outlets or SMS. Today, redBus has over 10,000 outlets across the country!
According to Mayank Bidawatka, Head of Marketing, over the years, the response to redBus has been phenomenal. “redBus has seen a 30 per cent month-on-month growth in bus ticket sales. We consider this, and the testimonials we regularly receive from customers as a favourable indication of the appreciation customers have towards our services. They appreciate the fact that we let them choose a seat and give them the option of getting their tickets home delivered. This truly adds value by giving them convenience, at no extra cost,” he says.
redBus also takes care of the security concerns of customers. They use Secure Socket Layers (SSL) data encryption. They say that this ensures the information exchanged with them is not transmitted unencrypted, thus protecting the information from being viewed by unauthorised individuals. In addition, the credit card information is also processed over secure gateways which are certified by Visa.
The next time you need an easy route to your destination log on to redBus.in or call 32537883/ 41483088/ 32537883 or drop in at #311, 7th Cross, Domlur.
