- rPool now includes bikes along with cars to enhance the drive towards shared mobility in cities
- Targeted at office goers, bike pooling will be available in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune
Bengaluru, India: redBus, the world’s largest online bus ticketing platform, announces the introduction of bikes into rPool, its in-app ride sharing service that was launched recently. Starting with Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, this new service allows office goers to avail and offer rides in their personal two-wheelers, while commuting between home and their workplace.
Like car pool, bike pool, emerges from the need to develop sustainable solutions for the burgeoning traffic congestion problems that most Indian cities endure on an everyday basis. The spurt in ownership of private vehicles over the last decade, far outpaces the development of infrastructure needed to sustain them, resulting in severe cramming, impacting the quality of life, environment and the economy. According to multiple studies conducted, Indian cities are among the most congested in the world.
The higher travel duration resulting from congestion within cities and inadequate public transport infrastructure, has led to commuters relying on personal two-wheelers, especially for travel to and from work, considering their size advantage and manoeuvrability. About 75% of all vehicles in India are two-wheelers, with one in three households owning one. Two-wheelers are therefore best suited for shared commute, thanks to greater concentration, easier access and quicker travel, comparatively. The concept also allows young office-goers, savings on fuel as they share costs by offering their pillion seats to a co-rider. redBus believes in the concept of ‘shared mobility’, as a sustainable option to tackling the situation of vehicular congestion and considers bike pooling to be one of the best solutions, in addition to carpooling.
About bike pool from rPool
A newly added facility to the rPool service offering, Bike pool is a solution for working professionals, enabling them to offer and avail rides, between their homes and offices. It uses advanced technology to connect ride givers and ride takers in the fastest and most convenient manner possible. The matching algorithm ensures that ride givers don’t have to deviate or take any detours from their daily work route and ride takers get to travel the maximum distance of their commute as a part of the shared ride.
Features
- Verified Profiles via multiple checks: In order to build a trusted community of ride givers and ride takers, the facility is restricted to working professionals undertaking daily commute. Users are verified through their mobile number and their organization’s corporate email id.
- Safe, secure and, private: ‘rPool’ has introduced phone number masking which enables users to connect with each other via the redBus app without revealing their phone numbers to each other, thus ensuring privacy. Ride takers would be provided accident insurance free of cost for each ride. Ride givers also have an option to specify if they have an extra helmet for the ride taker or if the ride taker mandatorily needs to bring in a helmet for themselves.
- In-App chat feature: For ease of communication between the ride givers and ride takers, there is an in-app chat that allows One-To-One chat and group chat if a ride is available on the app. This protects user identity and allows for better coordination.
- Attractive Incentives: Ride givers can configure incentives, ranging from Re. 1 to Rs. 4 per kilometer for offering rides. They also earn 2X for the first 10 rides. Promo code feature is live for both ride givers and ride takers. This will be available over and above the default offers. Customers may watch out for exclusive deals from partners.
- Inaugural Launch Offer: As an inaugural offer, for the first 500 ride givers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune each, rPool would be charging zero commission for the first 5 years.
- User profiles and feedback mechanism: The platform allows creation of user profiles based on user reviews, allowing participants the option of choosing the people they wish to travel with, based on their ratings. It also offers women ride givers or takers to choose to travel with women alone, as an option.
Speaking on the occasion, Prakash Sangam, CEO – redBus said, “Indian cities have a large concentration of two-wheelers on roads and it is the primary means of private transport for many commuters. Many car owners also prefer to use two-wheelers to commute as they are faster, lead to lower congestion and are less expensive. To support this segment, we are including bikes in our in-app, ride-sharing platform, rPool. This would expand the base of commuters that we cater to and help us towards our mission of improving mobility options that are greener, cost efficient and a fun way to travel.”
The Bike Pool option has been initially enabled for commuters in the cities of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, who roughly account for about 10 million two-wheelers on their roads and we plan to launch in other cities soon. We are excited to see how people perceive this latest addition to the rPool service and at the same time we will be working hard to add even more user-friendly features in coming weeks on the rPool platform.
About redBus
redBus was founded in 2006 in India and today is the world’s largest online bus ticketing platform. After having solved complex problems of bus customers in India, redBus also launched operations in Singapore and Malaysia in 2015 and acquired a majority stake in Peru based bus ticketing platform Busportal (now redBus.Pe) in the subsequent year. With this acquisition, redBus successfully launched operations in Latin America markets, Peru & shortly thereafter, Colombia.
redBus has globally sold more than 180 million bus tickets till date and has a customer base of around 20 million users. redBus is now part of the MakeMyTrip group (Nasdaq, MMYT) which is the largest travel aggregator in India with offerings across categories such as Flights, Hotels, Holiday Packages, etc.
The business owns three products – redBus™, redBus Plus™ and redBus Partner™, which come together to serve and address the fragmented bus industry across geographies.
- redBus™ is the popular consumer-facing travel brand enabling customers to buy bus tickets online. Consumers, depending on where they live, can access redBus on the web (redbus.in, redbus.my, redbus.sg, redbus.id, redbus.pe and redbus.co). They can also download the high rated redBus mobile app from Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We enable a customer to search for bus services on a route of his/her choice, reserve a seat and make a payment to confirm the booking, thus bringing the seller and buyer on a single platform to facilitate easy bus booking.
- redProWin™ is a cloud-based solution built for bus operators. Approximately 2500+ bus operators in India, SEA and Latin America use this platform for their day to day operations. The revolutionary inventory management software ensures seat realization and resource utilization, thus improving revenue and profitability for bus operators. Over the years, through the use of engineering & data analytics, redBus has offered features such as LIVE bus tracking, dynamic pricing, customer relationship management, etc., which have helped bus operators improve operational efficiency as well as service quality.
- redBus Partner™ is a GDS for bus inventory distribution and is used by more than 20,000 retail agents and 200+ OTAs to sell bus tickets to their customers.
