Swarlai - SMS Bus Seat Reservation System

While we do have Daewoo bus service where people can reserve seats through phone, a majority of the people, especially from the lower classes don’t normally travel through Daewoo. Smaller transport services do not offer telephone reservations as they cannot afford it. Even if telephone reservation is available, some people and female population in rural areas don’t feel confident in using it. They are away from stations and it is difficult for them to go and reserve seat for them. To bridge this gap, we are developing a reservation system that will allow people to reserve seats through SMS or through an automated call in different languages. We’ll link with small transport owners and we’ll have a separate phone number for them where they can send a free SMS whenever they give reservation for a seat. That number will be connected to our main database which will keep track of all free and reserved seats. We’ll have another number for users to send SMS to, or to call for making a reservation, which will also be connected to the main database and the system will allocate a free seat to the phone number that was used to make the reservation. Users will get a reservation number. Besides SMS and Automated calls, we are also planning to have a website and an app in the future as well for reserving seats. The SMS service will cost user 2 to 5 Rupees for each reservation, which will act as a revenue source for us and also as a deterrent to making unnecessary reservations. This, we believe, will be an effective alternative to reserving seats and it’s cost effective as well. The only cost associated with the project in terms of money is SMS and automated call subscription charges, and advertising expenses. We can do the coding on our own. On a rough estimate, if we launch the project in a few local cities in the beginning, we can safely assume that we’ll get at least 10000 reservations a day (e.g. more than 40,000 passengers take transportation to/from Mingora-Swat general bus stand every day). That gives us projected revenues of Rs. 30000 to Rs. 50,000 per day (Rs. 0.9 M to Rs 1.5 M a month) for Malakand region only. This figure is expected to go up exponentially as we expand to other cities of Pakistan. In the beginning we’ll try local cable networks and billboards in the targeted regions to keep advertising costs low. Once we are generating enough cashflows, we’ll then use other mediums for advertising as well including banners on all the buses linked to our network. Our team members are the students of Software Engineering with the excellent related skills. And we are working under the mentorship of Mr. Fazli Subhan, Manager Research Operations| ORIC, University of Malakand, who is an Entrepreneur and his worked as consultant to startups and SMEs 5 different countries including UK, France and Belgium.