Service Review: Redbus.in online ticket booking

Redbus.in is an year and a half old startup by few young entrepreneurs (under Pilani Soft Labs Pvt. Ltd) and is funded by Seedfund.in, who call Redbus.in as one of their flagship investments. Bharti Jacob of Seedfund.in said at a Startup Saturday in IIMB that Redbus business volume has reached from 10 tickets a day to nearly 1000 tickets a day. That’s a phenomenal and promising growth for an infant start up. Kudos to Redbus team.

With due respects to everyone involved, I recently read in Mouthshut.com several negative reviews about this service and few of my friends also felt they could have got better services had they avoided RedBus. I’ve not verified how legitimate these complaints are but they appear to be written by irate passengers who didn’t get the expected quality of service from bus operators for the tickets purchased through Redbus.in. Few others had payment and customer care related issues.

Based on my own observation and analysis coupled with information sourced from above, I’m offering in this post a review of Redbus.in-their business model, market conditions, scope for improvements and more.

In this scenario we have following stake holders: A bus operator and their staff, Passengers and Redbus.in who coordinates between these 2. To me it looks like bus operators are not much dependent on Redbus.in to fill their seats but its passengers who are lazy to go to nearest travel agent and Redbus which has stepped in as a mediatory trying to cash in on this. In any business, it’s always desirable to get rid of middlemen, even if it means a little inconvenience and same goes for Bus ticket booking. Even airlines are planning to adopt a “no commission to travel agents” policy because internet has become so common enabling customers to book direct at airline website so that they don’t find a need to depend on travel agents any more. Soon those willing to avail the services of travel agents for air tickets will have to pay the agents themselves.

Coming back to Redbus.in, here are my observations:
Most of the popular and leading bus operators have their own websites and strong network of agents-these operators are able to fill the seats on their own and have not subscribed to Redbus.in. Even with other operators, there’re serious allegations that those going to the boarding point with a ticket booked through Redbus.in are not treated well. If you’re wondering what problems bus crew have in giving prompt service to redbus customers, you need to understand the way private bus operators function.

Traditionally, running an inter-city bus service will involve following stake holders-The owners, their staff (driver and conductor) and travel agents. Most of the seats are filled usually by travel agents, who make their money by way of commissions received. With the entry of Redbus.in, the travel agent is sensing a competition which is cutting into his earnings (Till yesterday you were going to his office to book tickets and now you’re directly going to the boarding point in front of his office with a red bus booked ticket in hand. Why will he give the same old service when he is not getting a penny out of you?). These travel agents interact closely with bus drivers and conductors, hence have an upper hand in ensuring quality of services to passengers (or the lack of it), than Redbus.in which doesn’t have a physical presence at the boarding point and deals only with the owners of a Bus Company.

Travel agents, in nexus with bus crew, often cheat bus owners by saying “x number of seats were empty yesterday” while selling those seats in the last minute to desperate travelers without issuing proper tickets. Depending on the demand supply situation these last minute passengers sometime manage to bargain hard and pay as low as 50% of the normal fare and travel without the ticket (or at times forced to pay premium). I’ve personally experienced in Omer travels who put plastic stools in the passage way and accommodate extra people. Money earned through these unaccounted seats is often shared among bus crew and travel agent who brings the passengers. More the number of passengers coming through RedBus.in and other such service providers less will be the chance for these people to unofficially sell off a seat and make money. RedBus.in customers, having paid in full, are at the mercy of the bus crew to reach their destinations and often get worst of the service due to bad attitudes and mentality of some bus crew. Only surprise raids by bus owners can stop this.

Not all customer face above situation, but probability is fairly high if you’re travelling with lesser known bus operators who may neither have proper control on their staff nor have cared to educate their staff on how to treat a customer.

Few Redbus customers complain their bad experience-Redbus routes the complaint to bus owner, who in turn ask the same staff for an explanation. Any cooked up explanation given by these people will be promptly relayed back to the customer. Some readymade excuses are “That bus had a technical issue, so we had to send them in an alternate bus”, “there was some confusion regarding boarding point-we weren’t correctly informed” and such. If Redbus can afford to send some ground staff at popular pickup points (like T Nagar and Koyambedu in Chennai, GandhiNagar in Bangalore, Ameerpet, Lakdi ka pool in Hyderabad and so on) to assist its customer that will be great.

What Redbus should do:

1. Provide an option where those booking tickets through Redbus can give their feedback and rating for a particular travels on the redbus website. If several customers have given a poor rating to a particular travels, others can avoid that travels
   
2. Make bus owners to conduct surprise checks to verify if the bus crew is treating Redbus booked ticket holders at par with others. Also consider sending some ground staff to popular pick up points to verify if your customers are getting good treatment.
   
3. You’ve grown from 10 tickets a day to 1000 tickets a day. Obviously quality will suffer when volume grows out of control. Time to expand your call centre, invest in better infrastructures and be selective with the bus operators you sign up, so as to ensure there’s no dip in quality.
   
4. Do some basic checks before tying up with a new operator. Or if feedback on a particular operator is consistently bad, stop booking tickets for them
   

The convenience of not having to go to a travel agent and book online from your home/office is a good experience, but only if that is complemented by a prompt service when you go to board the bus. As redbus is capable of attracting huge number of customers they should voluntarily extend their services beyond just booking a ticket to ensure that customers indeed get a pleasant travel experience. If they are giving good volume of business to bus companies they can easily demand that their customers are not neglected by bus crew and quality of service is not compromised.

I’ve also read that Redbus team takes feedback from its customers and tries its best to address concerns (someone claimed Redbus booked a flight ticket free of charge for the customer when his bus ticket was cancelled but no alternate arrangements could be made-If that is true that’s really worth appreciating) I believe Redbus team will take my post in right spirit and will work towards better customer satisfaction. I wish them all the best.

How was your experience with Redbus.in or other such services (customerneedz.com and such)? Comment and tell us.

Similar: Hyderabad-Bangalore by Bus-Comparison of operators * Want cheapest flight tickets? avoid travel sites * Try self drive car rentals *

April 2009 Update: I see that RedBus has introduced customer reviews feature, one of the suggestions made in this post. Appreciate this feature and hope customers will find it handy.

Disclaimer: Independent observations only. Actual experience may differ from user to user. Use your discretion