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Buses make up over 90% of public transport in Intra-city travel in India and serve as a cheap and convenient mode of commutation.
The ongoing covid pandemic created an urgency to change the way the public travel by these buses. With the different waves of Covid, people not only took precautions to maintain social distancing while traveling but also expected contactless ticketing so that unnecessarily they do not have to come in contact with the conductor or fellow passengers. Various state governments echoed the same mandate for public transport buses and that actually paved the path for existing transport technology companies to devise contactless ticketing solutions.
Chalo, one of the leading bus transport technology companies, seized this opportunity by implementing a contactless ticketing solution by partnering with Trillbit. Chalo provides an app-based end-to-end solution for public buses where commuters not only track buses in real-time but can buy tickets online. Easy to use interface and intuitive utility has accelerated Chalo’s growth and taken them to 22 cities with millions of happy rides every month. While many other players are trying to bring ticketing solutions based on QR, NFC, or EMV Cards, what makes Trillbit’s solution unique is that it is fast, truly contactless, and very cost-effective.
In the past, Chalo also tried to adopt other technology solutions especially QR-based ticketing but understood the limitations of QR in a moving bus. With varying lighting conditions and the bus moving, the bus conductor always has difficulty scanning QR tickets. Since the QR code on the Screen of the passenger's mobile needs to be in the line of sight of the conductor's scanning device, it is actually a half-baked contactless solution. But being a customer obsessive company, Chalo seeks to remove these hurdles and that’s where they started working with Trillbit to integrate “data over sound’ based ticketing on their app.
Trillbit’s solution enabled Chalo users to do ticket authentication in a truly contactless way. Now once Chalo users purchase tickets and onboard the bus, they just have to open the ticket screen of the app. Ticketing data from commuters’ mobile gets transferred to the conductor's POS through ‘data over sound’. The entire process takes less than 2 seconds which is a very high productivity gain as compared to when conductors used to do QR scanning.
Vinayak Bhavnani, CTO and Co-founder of Chalo is excited about Trillbit technology and being very instrumental in deploying this technology for the Chalo technology stack. He told "We extensively tested Trillbit technology for ticketing verification for buses at our platform. Trillbit performs better against QR in terms of speed, efficacy, and user convenience. We are looking forward to implementing Trillbit Solutions for all our operating cities and for more than a million daily commuters in the next six months'' .
With the recent launch of the Chalo app in Mumbai, Trillbit’s partnership with Chalo will help in providing a seamless traveling experience for the commuters of the 3500+ fleet of buses of BEST. This is a shining example of two growing startups to partner and build a solution that is truly made in India for Indian people.
