Redbus.in. Review on Redbus

The Tickets used to be booked through the traditional brick-and-mortar agents till 2006. That is when BITS Pilani alumni Phanindra Sama, Sudhakar Pasupunuri and Charan Padmaraju started Redbus, to sell bus tickets online. The idea emanated from an experience that Phanindra had in the winter of 2005 in Bangalore, when he struggled to book bus tickets to make it home for Diwali and spend the vacations with his family. Diwali is one of the peak times in the year and every single bus agent in the city seemed to be booked and he could not make it to home in time. Phanindra realised the need for a convenient, hassle-free portal where customers could book their tickets from the comforts of their home. An additional benefit of RedBus was the fact that you could book your ticket for the return journey in advance without having to travel to the destination with the uncertainty of securing a ticket looming over your head. Seedfund was the organisation which was one of the very first investor of redbus. Mahesh Murthy, a founding partner of Seedfund, writes about why he thinks redbus is innovative. Mahesh has been kind enough to let us reproduce his article, on our blog for the benefit of our network. It has been an honour for E-Cell to be associated with him.At the macro level, imagine this. You want to go home to Hyderabad from Bangalore – and you hate the fact that you have no idea which bus will have seats to take you there, and when that is scheduled to leave. That’s when you figure out that, hey, perhaps you can solve the problem. And perhaps you can build a business while doing so.So you create the inventory from the ground up. You decide you need to start at the bottom, build out the GDS for this industry. You actually build the bus booking eco system at 3 levels simultaneously – the GDS across operators; the booking system / ERP for each individual bus operator – so they become e-enabled and can control which seat goes to whom; and then the booking site at the retail level that we all see, where the public books tickets.Guess what, we at Seedfund routinely announce the funding, and soon see three other competing companies get funded with 3 to 4 times the money, within 6 months.