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The olive-green Volvo bus, parked outside The Grand Regent here on Avinashi Road, looked like any other luxury coach. But a quick look at the interiors of the Bangalore-bound bus showed that the coach was designed to offer travellers the comfort of a business class flight.
The service is from Olivea Travels, a part of the Blue Hill Group, which is promoted by the directors of Nilgiris, a supermarket chain in the South.
With special features including 165 degrees leather reclining ergonomic seats, electronically operated calf support, lumbar support, multi-level head rests and high definition DTH for each seat and washroom, “it has the effect of being inside an aircraft,” remarked a lady traveller.
Mr Piyush Khandelwal, Head – Marketing, Olivea Travels, told this correspondent that food and drinks would be served en-route.
“Our coaches have been designed to bridge the gap between air travellers and road travellers. We started with 4 buses, the first being the Bangalore- Chennai service. We have since added 10 more to our fleet and plan to scale it to 100 over the next five years,” he said.
Though priced at least two to three times the air conditioned bus fare (for the same route), the number of persons patronising this service is said to have risen considerably, since launch. “The response has been good. We introduced the Coimbatore-Bangalore service only last month and the average occupancy has been around 60 per cent,” he said.
It is plying buses in the Delhi-Agra, Delhi-Chandigarh and Delhi-Amritsar route in the North, besides connecting Bangalore-Tirupathi and Bangalore-Mysore in the South.
“We are planning to operate services from Delhi to Dehradun, Shimla and Kulu Manali from June,” he said.
The product offering is in segments where the time taken is comparable to end-to-end travel by flight and train, with various comfort features, he added.
The buses – sourced from Volvo and Mercedes Benz – have been specially designed by DC Designs, owned by Mr Dilip Chhabria. Each bus is said to cost upwards of Rs 1.75 crore.
Almost 40 per cent ticket bookings are through online travel agents. The company is offering these services only between those cities where the on-road travel time is below six-seven hours.
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