The Comprehensive Guide On Bus Ticket Booking Software Development

Let’s face it: Most of us are wanderlusts. Whenever we get some time and a few dimes, we love to travel and explore the world. Traveling remains great fun until the planning is plain-sailing. Thankfully, online booking solutions have made things easy and convenient.

The travel agencies, taxi companies, and even, bus services have started offering online booking services to enable customers to do the bookings in a few taps. The convenient booking is accompanied by several options, attractive discounts, and real-time visibility.

The Bus Booking solution is the one that’s gaining maximum traction. It eliminates the need to stand in long queues to get the ticket booked alongside the risks of getting infected with the coronavirus. After the pandemic, the importance of Ticket Booking Software Development is highly realized by the bus services. They have witnessed significant growth after jumping on the mobile bandwagon.

Source: Statista

The year-on-year growth in revenue from the online ticket system showcase that people are meticulously using mobile booking. This is the reason the travel agencies and bus services favoring Mobile app development. Plus, the innovative features help the bus services to differentiate the services in the crowded market.

Let’s discuss everything related to the bus ticket booking app in detail, including its various aspects.

Bus ticket booking app in a nutshell

The bus ticket booking app is a mobile bus reservation system that allows passengers to view the buses during the specific schedule, check the bus ratings, bus types, amenities, and seat availability, and then let them do the bookings after the payment. The system keeps a record of all the customers’ data related to the booking centrally, including passenger details, bus details, booking data, reservation details, and much more.  

How does Ticket Booking Mobile App work?

• Choose the pick-up and drop-off location: After selecting the pick-up and drop-off location, the users will get the list of buses providing the services for a specific schedule.
• Enable co-traveler management: Some travelers prefer co-traveler of a particular gender, say female travelers prefer a female as a co-traveler. It makes the passengers happy.
• Verify extra facilities: The travelers often require extra amenities, food availability, or anything related that satisfy the users with special needs.
• Confirm booking: After selecting everything, the users can confirm the booking and can preview the details before making the payment.
• Rate and review the services: After the bus journey, the passengers are asked to provide the reviews and rate the services on the app store or within the app.

The bus ticket app’s features lessening the booking woes

The bus ticketing solution comprises three different interfaces- passenger, operator panel, and admin panel.

For passengers:

• Securely register or log in using email, phone number, or credentials.
• Social login shortens the login process. Just a single tap and users can log in.
• View and manage the profile.
• Search bus availability by date, time, number of stops, source, and destination.
• View available buses working under different travel agencies.
• Apply various filters such as fare, time, amenities, seat availability, boarding, and dropping point for the sorted search.
• View graphical map of seats that are booked and available.
• Make the seat selection and then confirm a booking.
• Calculate the bus fare even before making bookings.
• After booking, the users can get a print of the bus ticket sent through email or from within the app.
• Get push notifications for booking confirmation, bus arrival at the boarding point, and others.
• Validate the bus ticket by scanning the QR code right through the app.
• Receive loyalty points on every booking that can be redeemed later.
• Refer the app to friends to earn extra rewards.
• Travel insurance is provided to keep the lives of passengers secured during travel.
• The ticket is canceled and the amount refunded for the same.
• The in-app chat to instantly connect with customer support.
• Send auto-reminders for the pending trip via in-app calendar integration.

For travel operators:

• Enable secure registration and login through credentials provided by the system.
• Create and manage the profile.
• A central dashboard to view total bookings, transactions, revenue, refunds, and others.
• Receive alerts for every booking confirmed by the users.
• View and manage ticket scanning.
• View and manage bus routes and bookings.
• Real-time tracking of the bus.
• View and access sales summary.
• Reporting and analytics to get rich insights out of data.

For admin panel:

• The secure onboarding through credentials provided by the system.
• Create, view, and manage the push notifications.
• Manage customers’ and travel operators’ data.
• View and manage ad promotions and affiliate partners.
• View and manage customers’ reviews and ratings.
• View and manage various transactions such as payment to operator, refund, earning, and profits.
• View and manage ticket cancellation and refund.
• Manage payment gateway integration.
• Manage CMS and CRM integration.
• Use promotional tools to keep the users engaged.
• View and manage the loyalty programs to boost the retention rate.

Monetization model to cherish success

There are various ways to make money with bus ticket booking app development. They are:

• Commission model: The app owner allows the individual bus owners to register the bus on the mobile platform and get the bookings on mobile. A pre-defined commission is deducted from every transaction occurring at the platform before the amount is credited to the bus owner’s account.  
• Featured listing: The bus owners can prefer to get listed in the premium listing on the home page that brings the bus services at the forefront. The bus services who opt for a featured listing have to a certain amount for the listing.
• Advertisement: The owner sells the app space to the businesses or advertisers to place the ads on the mobile app for the product/service promotion.  

Technology stack for bus ticket booking software

The right mix of technologies, tools, and techniques not only builds your mobile presence; instead, they can put your business ahead of the competition. The decision of the right technology stack plays a vital role in ensuring high performance, glitch-free functionalities, simple and beautiful design engineering, and so on. The tech geeks at Nectarbits understanding the importance of tech stack leverage advanced technologies that enable the app to perform to the notch.

• For front-end mobile app development
  • Android Studio, Java, and Kotlin for Android development
  • Swift and Objective C for iOS app development
  • HTML5, CSS3, JS, Bootstrap, Angular, jQuery, and SASS for UI designing.
• For back-end development
  • Amazon web services, S3, and RDS
  • NoSQL, MySql, MongoDB, Jersey, and Redis database
  • AWS server, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Compute Engine for cloud-based backends.
  • Python, Ruby, and Node.JS as scripting programming languages
  • Caching– Hazelcast
  • Code Repository– Git
  • Load Balancer– Nginx
• Third-party API integration
• Stripe, authorize.net, Braintree, PayPal, citrus, Google wallet, and Paystack for payment integration
• Twilio for in-app chat integration
• Mandril and outlook for email
• Twilio, Push.io, and Firebase APIs for push notification integration.
• Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter for social channel integration.
• Using Zoho, Microsoft Dynamics, and SalesForce as CRM to strengthen customer relationships.
• Analytics tools- KISSmetrics, Piwik, Hotjar, and Woopra to measure performance.
• Google map, Apple map, and Waze integration for map navigation.

The cost of bus ticket app development

It’s well said, no one can specify the ballpark cost for the bus ticket app development because the size, type, and nature of business bring gala differences to the app development. It means the app development cost depends on several factors- geographical location, application requirements, technology usage, and team size.

When you hand over the project development task to a bus ticket app development company, the development cost breakdown looks like this-

• App development cost for a bus ticket app with basic functionalities is $10,000 for one platform. When you want the app to build for the iOS and Android platforms, the cost gets doubled. When the number of advanced functionalities increased, the cost will surge accordingly.
• The development cost is comparatively inexpensive in Asian countries that move around $20-$100 per working hour. The development price varies according to developers’ proficiency and experience.
• The number of people involved in the project development team consumes a different number of working hours to get the job done. The total number of working hours depends on how much time they require. Let’s see-
  • The Project manager who manages the project and communicates with the client on the behalf of the whole team requires 50 working hours.
  • The coding superheroes who create both- front-end and back-end need 150 working hours.
  • UI/UX designers are responsible to craft the elegant UI need 100 working hours.
  • QA and testers that rigorously test the application require 70 working hours.
  • The delivery manager is responsible for app delivery followed by app marketing if required. He needs around 40 working hours.
  • All in all, nearly 400 working hours get consumed in total, which is when multiplied by the hourly rate, the total development cost is calculated.

Takeaway

The bus ticket app development has created waves in the bus transport market with its plethora of business advantages. There is a lot of territories that are not explored yet, which is encouraging the individual owners or bus aggregators to get built a bus ticket app. Are you willing to grow your bus services considerably? Let your app idea fly with proper execution, where you need the right partner. If you have any queries, get connected with us to know everything you wanted to know.