Hyderabad: AbhiBus, a leading online bus travel aggregator has witnessed 100% spike in its engagement since lockdown with 5 Million online bus bookings since lockdown. This development is a result with the gradual ease in the lockdown and with festivities wherein people started traveling across states that was restricted otherwise in the past 6-7 months. The online bus aggregator has recorded an average daily booking rate of 50000 within 3 days of the Dussehra weekend.
The Hyderabad-Vijayawada route has witnessed the maximum bookings with 84000 even after state-owned transports including APSRTC & TSRTC starting operations in late October. The Delhi-Jammu route surprisingly saw a remarkable spike in traffic with around 31000 online bookings that is primarily triggered by travelers visiting Vaishno Devi from across the country during Navratri and thereafter. The Delhi-Jammu route has also overtaken the previously most engaged route in the North for Abhibus i.e. the Delhi-Lucknow route by 2X which has witnessed a traffic of around 15000 this festive season as working professionals have started moving back towards NCR from their natives.
Sharing his insight to this exponential spike in engagement during the festivity, Rohit Sharma, Chief Operating Officer of Abhibus said, “We were expecting our November bookings count to exceed the booking we made in Last November. Interestingly, during Covid lockdown, the intrastate travel was 80% and inter-state 20% which got reversed to 70% bookings for inter-state travel and 30% for intra-state travel post unlock 5.0. The sentiments of the people played a critical role in this recent spike as everyone’s life was paused during the lockdown and people were craving to move out whether it is for leisure travel or working Millennials moving back to the metros”.
Other than the top two routes the other regions wherein Abhibus witnessed considerable engagement is Pune-Nagpur with 14500 seats bookings in the last one month as Maharashtra was under lockdown for the longest period and bus movements have started in the second half of October. The Jaipur – Delhi route too have seen decent traffic with 13,000 seat bookings as people and businessmen started moving back to NCR. Tamil Nadu being the last state to relax inbound traffic has also seen 10x increase with 31,800 bookings in last 10 days.
Additionally, AbhiBus provides Online Reservation solutions to over 300 private and 5 RTC operators that witnessed over 2 crore tickets sold during this period where online reservations touched a highest-ever 50%.