Kapil Raizada and Manish Rathi – who co-founded Rail Yatri in 2011 – wished to offer more travel options to the common man in India. IntrCity SmartBus came into existence in 2018 and is completely driven by technology and data. The aim is to help cure the jaundiced view of people towards bus travel. Sarada Vishnubhatla meets Kapil Raizada to get a low-down on how they are transforming the concept of bus travel.
A cancelled travel plan is a bane to an economy!
Soft-spoken Kapil Raizada, Co-Founder – IntrCity, packs a verbal punch in favour of how bus travel should not be the ‘perpetual fallback option’ for travellers.
He reveals: “In India, unplanned or travel plans at a short-notice do not generally materialize. Imagine the potential revenue that these trips can unlock, if they are undertaken. People hold back because of insufficient modes of travel. The intent is there, yet there are not enough avenues to suck that money out of the system. IntrCity SmartBus helps open up these travel choke points which can actually fuel our economy.”
Kapil Raizada, Manish Rathi and Sachin Saxena co-founded their first company, Rail Yatri in 2011. Rail Yatri began as a ‘comprehensive hub of train travel information to give its users information to help them plan and undertake train journeys’. Today, Rail Yatri has grown into a network of over 20 million users with a monthly average revenue of over $5 million, and is pegged at a month-on-month growth of 15-20%, today.
He shares: “We began working on the concept of bus travel in 2017 and worked with third-party buses. We went deeper into understanding the long-distance travel situation in India and realised that whatever be the mode of transport, a traveller is at the root of it all who needs to feel comfortable, safe and the cost is economical to him. People taking flights are more concentrated in metro and mega cities, while the most of real India still travels by train or by road. And that is when we thought of working out an integrated platform which will help people find best trains and if the ticket is not coming through then we needed to shift these travellers to buses.”
This IIT-ian from Kanpur from 1993 batch, along with his partners, realized that people preferred not to travel by road in general because of various factors which include safety during night journeys; single women, families with small children and senior citizens typically do not wish to travel by buses; hygiene during journeys among others. And the problem was ‘large enough to warrant a thorough study of this space’ for IntrCity SmartBus (IntrCity).
Fuelled by the confidence the data provided, the partners launched their first co-branded bus with the name IntrCity earlier this year. But getting people to switch from rail to bus journeys was neither easy nor simple.
Raizada adds: “Removing bottlenecks – be it psychological, logistical or even infrastructural – comprises of focused investments in road travel, of course integrated with train solutions. Our goal is to guarantee standardized experience on our co-branded buses. Every bus will have a different bus owner or an operator but we are the stamp of quality. IntrCity helps the fleet owners who co-brand with us to maintain quality and performance on par with our specifications. The bus operator signs up to deliver all the amenities that we agree upon.”
Complying with specifications, for example, hiring a skilled driver or dry cleaning the linen every day, comes with a cost to the operator. He says: “The challenge with typical operators is that most of them fall in the SME category. It is a competitive space that they try to scale up their business. But they have limited expertise in using apps or doing digital promotions. They are more transport companies rather than consumer organizations. They also typically depend upon others for getting passengers to book tickets on their buses. IntrCity offers them digital understanding of the consumer world and our marketing expertise, and we can help them build collaterals. We cover some costs and risks for them but they need to comply with our specifications. It is working well.”
As on today, there are 50 buses that are co-branded as IntrCity while another dozen or so buses are in the pipeline. These buses typically cover 300-600 kilometres but plans are afoot to expand to long distance journeys as well.
Raizada adds: “We help them with our data insights into customer behaviours – be it their travel preferences or purchase patterns. We do data crunching and analytics to know what is the demand pattern, who to target, price recommendations. We do this because we do not want their assets to be under-utilized. We can do intelligent fleet deployment. Data is an essential lifeline to our business today. And the operators are now able to respect the fact that today’s consumer wants both value for money and is ready to pay money for value or quality.”
While most of the innovative ideas in the industry have more to do with ticket booking process, Raizada feels, a fully-integrated ERP system to offer end-to-end solution is not yet there: “It is still evolving. This industry as yet does not have a pan-India brand in this segment. State run transportation undertakings are only complementing the bus service but the way we see it, the governments need to allow higher private participation in this space.”
IntrCity is planning to expand its footprint to states like Bihar, Odisha, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and West Bengal. He explains: “Most companies organically move from south to west and may be then cover north. But east is largely untouched. We see big opportunities in the east and the north. To go up to our new UTs – Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, we need to develop local understanding first.”
IntrCity has recently launched a bus lounge in Lucknow with a seating capacity of up to 40, offering a safe and well-lit waiting area for passengers. They also have introduced the concept of having a bus steward who takes care of the passengers’ comfort till the destination.
Another of their bus lounge is in its final stages of construction in the heart of Bangalore, Karnataka.