Online bus bookings grew 25% in 2025: redBus CEO

Online bus bookings grew 25% in 2025, redBus CEO Prakash Sangam told The Hindu in an interview, reflecting growing demand for travel that airlines and railways are not able to keep up with as quickly as bus operators, as well as an accelerating shift to digital bookings.

“This includes market expansion that is happening because existing operators have added buses, and also because they’ve digitised a lot of operators who were earlier probably selling offline, but they have been able to digitise sales,” Mr. Sangam said.

“The largest market continued to be Maharashtra,” Mr. Sangam said. Maharashtra is the second most populated State in India, and the third largest by area. The next largest markets for online bus bookings are Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, he said. And the majority of seats sold online are air-conditioned: “In terms of the kind of inventory that is being sold, there is a clear trend towards premiumization,” he said. “The contribution of AC buses has gone up from 67% in the first hour of last year to 71%.”

78% occupancy

On average, buses are only plying with a fifth of the seats unsold, Mr. Sangam said, with an “overall occupancy” of 78%. “The key days on which the occupancy is high is again Fridays and Sundays,” he added. 4,000 new buses were added in 2025, he said, of which around 250 were premium Volvo buses, while 3,000 were air-conditioned buses.

“If you take just if you just take the AC market, about 50 to 55% of the market would be then sold online,” Mr. Sangam said.

Mr. Sangam said that bus manufacturers had shrunk their order capacities following the reduction in demand for travel during the COVID-19 pandemic. “After that, their order books were full, since they had limited capacities,” he said. “But even now, while they have expanded their capacity, they are operating at a very good order book rate.”

Tier-3 growth

Mr. Sangam said that while inter-metro routes were growing in keeping with historical trends, demand for travel from and to smaller towns was markedly higher. “Trips starting from one smaller town to another, that is growing phenomenally,” Mr. Sangam said. “That is outpacing the platform growth by nearly 50%.”

The firm expected pilgrimage travel to subside after the Kumbh Mela, Mr. Sangam said, but that did not happen. “We thought that [the Mela] would satiate the appetite for pilgrimage travel because so many people travelled” to Uttar Pradesh for the event, “but on the contrary, we have seen that pilgrimage travel has continued to strengthen and expand and grow.”