If you use buses to connect between cities frequently, or just them to occasionally travel to neighboring countries, you’ve probably been waiting for an online bus ticketing service that works so it does away with the frustrations of booking and paying for a ticket. A new startup addressing that problem, National Tickets, may be it.
Their service makes it possible for travellers to buy bus tickets – that is select a route, a preferred bus, select a seat, and pay for it – via the web, a phone call, SMS, or through agents to be found at shopping centres around the country. In the case of the call or SMS means, the payment is made using mobile money services like EcoCash, Telecash and NettCash, otherwise, on the web it’s all major cards and local mobile money solutions.
Macmillan Murebwa, business development director at National Tickets, is clear about the problem they are addressing;
advertisement
The Zimbabwean transport system has always been centralized with tickets only being available on the day of travel when you visit and one is not guaranteed of a seat with the service provider of one’s choice….the congestion at the site and harassment by touts and vendors, notwithstanding the time one has to spend queuing to make the purchase and/ or enquire about available seats and ticket prices
He pretty much summarises my own frustrations with buses and why as much as possible, I try to use alternatives. And this means one important thing; not only do they make it easier for people that rely on buses to travel, they may actually increase the number of travellers significantly by attracting those that avoided bus travel altogether. This growing-the-pie effect makes National Tickets quite valuable to bus operators, whom they need more of for the service’s usefulness.
National Tickets has so far signed up two major bus operators, Intercape and King Lion, effectively securing most of the busy local and regional routes. Harare to Plumtree; Harare to SA; Harare to Lusaka, Harare to Windhoek. Murebwa told us they are finalising agreements with more operators and will be introducing new routes soon.
Signing up operators hasn’t been easy, he said, “After trying to sell the idea we discovered that most bus operators in the country where not computerized.” Murebwa said they had to introduce applications on the operator’s end that would integrate with National Tickets’ platform to make buying and paying for tickets seamless for travellers. Convincing partners to start using news applications is no stroll in the park.
The proposition to the operators is clear though: there’s the obvious new convenience for travellers (and even the operator) that online ticketing brings, but there’s also additional valuable things like being able to plan their schedules better when bookings are made and paid for in advance, the reduced cost of processing a traveller’s booking & payment, plus the valuable data enabling them to discover travelling needs and introduce new schedules and even new profitable routes. Murebwa says they are clear about these benefits and explained in detail how confident and excited they are about the value they were bringing to the industry. So much they are providing operators no strings free trials so they can taste how it improves their business.
We asked Murebwa what the revenue model is, that is commission from bus operators, processing fee charged for each booking but he wouldn’t go into detail only saying that their was a Software as a Service product and that bus operators only pay for the service they need.
Just last month, a Zambia startup providing a similar solution for that market, Dot Com Zambia, got a US $500,000 dollar investment from Zambian and European VCs. It’s easy to see how they see value in a market that is likely to grow significantly as more people in Africa come online and use it to cut out the frustrations of offline drudgery in their lives.
- Technology Zimbabwe