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Online travel group, ibiboGroup, has rolled out RedBus in Singapore and Malaysia under the domain www.redbus.sg. With this, the travelers will now be able to book inter-city bus tickets between Singapore & Malaysia and between cities within Malaysia.
The launch is a part of “RedBus Global Platform” that supports multiple currencies, languages, time-zones and integrated with international payment systems.
For the services, RedBus has aggregated supply spanning 5700 bus routes in Singapore and Malaysia across large number of bus operators. On a daily basis, there are more than 100,000 seats available for sale and the ticket booking can be made either in Singapore Dollars or in Malaysian Ringgits.
The bus market in many countries is similar to that in India, characterized by a fragmented bus operator base and largely unorganized or semi-organized. As a result, much of the ticket booking happens offline at the physical ticketing counters of the bus operators.
“RedBus has shown through its experience in India that by deploying technology, it is possible to enable online real-time booking across a wide selection of bus operators, thus making life extremely convenient for bus travelers. With fully scaled out platforms for customers, bus operators and travel agents we have a firm conviction that a fundamentally strong business is possible in online bus ticketing space at a multiple market level,” says Prakash Sangam, CEO, RedBus.
With this launch, tourists from India can also book bus tickets in Singapore / Malaysia by visiting the website or by changing the Region & Currency setting on the redBus apps.
After Redbus’ acquisition by ibibo Group, a joint venture between South Africa’s Naspers and Chinese Internet company Tencent, the former has grown to acquire 75% share in the online bus ticketing segment. This growth comes on the back of increase in the number of transactions from mobile apps, product innovations, live tracking of buses and access to exclusive inventory of Govt. buses in previously weak markets such as UP and North India.
For Ashish Kashyap, Founder & CEO of ibiboGroup, this is yet another milestone in ibibo’s journey. “Ever since the acquisition we have worked hard to build out the new global platform, mobile apps and a solid management and technology team lead by Prakash. This has resulted in the growth of redBus.in accelerating to 80% year on year, market share further growing to 75%, mobile becoming a 40% share in transactions and all of this culminating to the launch of redBus in Singapore and Malaysia,” he adds.
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