Fly Through Bus Bookings With ticketvala.com

As per statistics from the Department of Road Transport and Highways, road networks in India carry nearly 85 percent of all passenger traffic. From all the available modes of road transport in the country, buses enjoy a large percentage of passenger traffic, thus, making bus ticket booking a procedure affecting the masses at large.

Solving The Pain Point Of Booking Bus Tickets

So how does one get all the information required to make a travel decision like the various buses available on a particular route? Many a times, people are unable to book a ticket due to the inaccessibility to a travel agent or overbooking of buses. Recognising this pain point and realising the advantage that technology could offer by providing an online option, Harnath Lokanadham started Ticketvala.com, an online platform for booking bus tickets within the country.

Introducing ticketvala.com, Harnath Lokanadham, CEO, ticketvala.com says, “The portal started with the aim to resolve a pain point, and it is today enabling real-time bus ticket transactions. To implement this, we started collaborating with operators and today have close to three hundred operators associated with us. Our goal is to maximise real-time transactions and unless we do that, the consumers’ convenience is really not met. There is a huge consumer base in India comprising those wanting to travel by bus and the difficulty starts right from access to information. We thought that we could do something about this problem and saw this as an opportunity, which we could cash into. We therefore decided to provide a solution to this entire problem and enable real-time transactions”.

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The challenge of dealing with non-IT savvy bus operators

A major problem faced by ticketvala.com was the difficulty in having to deal with bus operators who were far from being tech savvy. Most of the bus operators in India that they wanted to partner with were using manual systems. Informs Harnath, “Ticketvala.com works on technology adoption by bus operators, which is converted into a distribution platform for the end-consumer to conveniently book via various channels.”

“Technology is the major contributor to our business. The reason for this is that the volume of this business in the market is quite large. Therefore, scalability and reaching out to the entire country were some of the major challenges that we were facing and without having an apt technology solution this could not have been possible and we are leveraging this to our bus operators as well.”

IT - The backbone of the portal

A great business idea has to be supported by IT if it has to be converted into reality. IT at ticketvala did just that. It is the backbone of the company and the driving factor behind its success.

“All the solutions are proprietary in nature and the IP is completely developed in-house. Technology is very strong and serves as the backbone of the entire business model,” opined Harnath.

Added Prameet Slava, CTO, ticketvala.com, “The entire ticketvala portal is functioning on the solid platform of Java. Java provides a reliable, scalable and a stable platform for deploying mission critical enterprise level applications. We have a huge database, which is constantly maintained by us, and on top of that we have the application server where all the business logistics are followed by the presentation layer. The presentation layer reflects all the content on the web pages. This is the basic three-tier architecture that we follow, which is highly scalable.”

During the preliminary research, ticketvala.com found that the market that it was looking at was not IT savvy at all. Thus, when the company went and met the bus operators it had to address issues such as training, getting the right hardware and other IT-related issues. “We hadn’t anticipated these things but worked our way around it and gave them an end-to-end solution. This eased their difficulties and increased adaptability,” said Prameet.

Major Hurdles That Had to Be Jumped Over

One of the major challenges that ticketvala.com faced was maintaining a site that functioned twenty-four hours a day and one that would have a large number of transactions taking place every day. “We needed an environment, which was extremely stable where we could host the applications and ensure a 99.9 percent availability guarantee. This had to be done because all the bus operators were using our software as their back-end and were running their business with it. This meant that we needed to have a backup facility, a DR site in case anything went wrong, because we just couldn’t afford to take a chance for anything,” elaborated Prameet.

The bus operators use the real-time facility to monitor their inventory. This also makes ticketvala.com a sales channel for them. The company is also taking advantage of Web2.0 technologies to give its users a holistic experience. The IT team at ticketvala.com currently consists of 35 people.

Bus operators tread on the Internet path

Bus operators and travel agents are traditionally used to booking tickets and keeping records manually. Now having gone online and having become an integral part of a portal like ticketvala.com, these agents and operators have become IT savvy. Ticketvala proved to be the beginning point for their journey to automation.

Talking about how being online is benefitting bus operators, Indrajeet P Konduskar, director, Konduskar Travels said, “With our systems now online, the load factor of passengers has increased by almost 4 percent on the main routes. There is an overall increase of 6 percent on the other routes. Being online has benefitted us immensely and we are expecting at least a 10 percent growth in the entire financial year. Being a partner with a portal such as ticketvala.com, we get exposure about new routes and it is also easier for us to reach customers because ticketvala is helping us market these new routes. We’ve stopped using physical registers and charts and now have the searing charts online. This is helping us in allocation of buses. The e-bus platform is also helping us monitor the productivity of buses and thus, enabling a significant reduction in costs.”

The Road Ahead

Having started with a vision to make bus bookings easier for customers, the three-year-old company is quite content with where it has reached today. The portal has brought forward an IT distribution platform for bus operators and intends on enhancing its business offerings with some very ambitious plans.

Concluded Harnath, “We have six branches across the country currently and are looking to increase that to twelve. We are also planning to bring in some other content like budget hotels and car hires. We envisage our website to have all content, which could be of significance to the segment of consumers we are targeting.”