BENGALURU: The transport sector is seeing green shoots of recovery with the rise in demand for bus travel, the bus ticketing platform — redBus — has revealed. Over the October 2 long weekend, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and West Bengal recorded maximum demand for travel in the country, while the top destinations preferred by passengers were Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Ahmedabad.
The top five routes where redBus is witnessing a significant increase in booking are Bengaluru-Hyderabad, Delhi-Chandigarh, Hyderabad- Vijayawada, Asansol- Kolkata and Gorakhpur- Delhi. The online platform has seen a rise in first-time customers with the transaction nearly doubling from 11 per cent in pre-Covid times to 21 per cent after the breakout.
Another interesting trend is the willingness of people in Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns to travel, resulting in them contributing around 67% of the current bookings, as they return to their workplaces. It was 56 per cent before the Covid broke out. Some of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities with high demand for bus travel apart from Bengaluru are Jaipur, Gorakhpur, Indore, Visakhapatnam, Kalaburagi, Rajkot, Malda and Guwahati.