Demand for bus travel mounts in country

The demand for bus services is found to be very high across the country.

With Union Ministry of Home advocating for unhindered inter-state travel, the industry is witnessing massive demand for travel from customers across the country, a Demand-Supply Conundrum report published by travel services platform Abhibus.

Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Goa have emerged as the top-5 cities where people are found to be searching for bus services.

Chennai has witnessed route searches of 6,00,000 weekly searches with Bengaluru-Chennai and Hyderabad-Chennai accounting for three lakh weekly searches each. Hyderabad due to limited routes is also most sought after on the list with seven lakh weekly searches. These include Vijayawada-Hyderabad (1.25 lakh searches), Vizag-Hyderabad (90,000 searches), Bengaluru-Hyderabad (1.60 lakh searches) routes.

“The supply side remains a huge dampener due to shortage of buses in most routes,” the report said.

“Private operators have opened up the routes despite a loss making proposition largely due to having to maintain social distancing norms – impacting the inventory of seats and additional expenses being incurred for maintaining safe travel conditions,” it said.

“Most of these top destinations are seeing three to five times increased interest compared to the interest in last September. Customers are waiting for opening up of routes to predominantly undertake essential travel and to some extent tourism,” Rohit Sharma, Chief Operating Officer of Abhibus, said.