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MOTORINDIA
l
September 2012
In a casual chat with
MOTORINDIA, Phani,
as he is known among
his friends, talks on how
redBus commenced op-
erations in a small way,
but gathered momentum
soon to grow into its
present size.
True, in those days
there was no organised
way of making available
seats for passengers in
buses which plied on a
particular route. Travel
agents would make
phone calls to bus op-
erators to find out seat
availability, a long and
tedious process. Phani
was quick enough to find an IT-
based solution to vastly improve bus
ticketing and travel facilities in the
country.
Jointly with a couple of his col-
lege mates, he worked on a software
for bus operators which was later
named Bus Operator Software Sys-
tem (BOSSTM). Initially, the soft-
ware did not have much response
from operators as they were not
convinced of its viability. Phani had
to be content with selling bus seats
through ‘quotas’ on www.redBus.in.
The first bus operator to sign up
with redBus was Jabbar Travels,
while Rajesh Travels was the first
operator’s seat to be sold through
the site. Both of them are Bana-
glore-based operators. For three
years, the quota-based selling con-
tinued. However, with the growth
in number of customers, BOSS was
relaunched. The operators soon re-
alized the benefits of technology,
and buoyed by the prospects of an
online ticketing portal, hundreds
innovation
How
redBus
has revolutionized
Indian bus ticketing
Towards the close of 2005, a Senior design engineer at Texas Instruments was left strand-
ed in Bangalore, without being able to join his family for a festival in Hyderabad owing
to unavailability of bus seats. This was none other than Mr. Phanindra Sama, who was
prompted then to find some means of improving the unorganised way of bus-ticketing
in the country and who became the CEO of India’s largest bus-ticketing company today,
namely, redBus.
Mr. Phanindra Sama, CEO, redBus