Bus travel should be as easy as booking a cab

Dynamic pricing will soon play a huge role in the way the bus industry markets and operates, much like the air industry. Bringing together mathematics, statistics and business algorithms can elevate the industry to cutting-edge heights.

Algorithms can help the bus industry determine customer needs and enable first-mile to last-mile journey without much trouble. Bus travel booking could also become much like cab booking in the near future. Imagine you need to travel from Bangalore to Hyderabad. To add salt to meat (chicken, to be politically correct), let’s suppose you need to travel within the next hour. Trains would be difficult to get, and flights are out of the question. Private taxi fares touch flight charges, and hence the only good option that might be available are buses. But the service available may not be from a popular bus operator and likely the boarding point is very far away.

And worse, the bus will have seats that keep you bobbing up and down and bumping your head on the roof. Impulse travel between cities is still a challenge for the common traveller.

App to the rescue Now think of a different scenario. Here, you still need to travel from Bangalore to Hyderabad. Trains and flights will continue to be difficult to get.

But then you open your bus ticket booking app and you get a host of bus operators starting in the next 15 minutes to one hour. You can filter and find at least five popular bus operators with 5-star ratings.

You drill down and see buses arriving at boarding points within a five-minute walk from your house, and hey, even the best front seat is available for you.

Well, if the buses could come right up to the gate of your residence, there would not be much of a difference between cab booking and bus booking.

And this precisely is what ticket services should accomplish.

Traveller convenience requires the bus operators to leverage the travel behaviour of their customers to optimise bus schedules and routes to move from station-to-station services to point-to-point services.

This will have a significant impact on people movement whereby travelling from Jayanagar in Bangalore to Indiranagar in Bangalore will be no different from travelling from Bangalore to Mysore. You just need to pick your phone and book your tickets and go.

How this can be done Here are some key pointers on how this can be achieved:

Dynamic Pricing: Today, opportunistic pricing is possible only by scalpers who raise prices astronomically to trap last-moment travellers. There is no level playing ground on which bus operators are aware of the increased demand in a quantified manner and where customers can take advantage of advance booking six months ahead of travel.

By bringing in a dynamic pricing engine akin to an airlines pricing engine, there will be greater transparency for customers, there can be advance booking even a year ahead, and operators can participate equally, bringing more fairly distributed pricing across the industry. A clear win-win for all.

Route Discovery: Based on historic data and current supply for introducing new services

Schedule Optimisation: Based on supply data, allowing operators to plan their schedules and routes for maximum capital utilisation

Short trips: Bus operators largely prefer the overnight trips since they are able to charge customers on a “per passenger km” basis.

This practice has led to more and more seats being available on the overnight routes and therefore more and more customers partaking of the same.

Two kinds of towns and passengers terminating and commencing journeys stand somewhat neglected.

Those who wish to terminate at large and medium towns en route between overnight stations. Both boarding and alighting at odd hours becomes a problem, when, in fact, a slight tweaking of bus timings can make better realisations.

Traffic between non-metro large towns and medium towns is also poorly served by AC buses and this can dramatically improve realisations for the industry.

The way forward is to think of analytics and data as not the solution to anything, but as part of the solution to everything.

Pure sciences, especially mathematics and statistics, have a significant potential that can be exploited by industry at large for their customer benefits.

These data points will help industry with dynamic pricing, route optimisation, demand forecasting, rationalised scheduling and other deliverables to make a planned exercise such as inter-city travel booking become an impulse activity.

And that day is not too far!

R Narayanan is Chairman, Ticketgoose.com

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