The world’s largest road travel marketplace BlaBlaCar has bought the Ukrainian automated bus passenger transport management company Octobus. According to a BlaBlaCar press release, Octobus is a cloud-based platform that enables bus carriers to automate their business processes, from sales and marketing to analytics, accounting and fleet management. It is expected that thanks to the joint efforts of Octobus and BlaBlaCar, bus carriers will receive key functionality that will help them to be competitive and increase the pace of development in the current market conditions. These include the ability to create own website and mobile application for online sales, as well as own call center for phone sales and a mobile application for drivers and staff.
The Octobus deal will allow BlaBlaCar to accelerate the digitalization of the bus market in Ukraine and scale it to countries where bus operators still sell most of their tickets offline at bus stations and ticket offices. In turn, BlaBlaCar users will have more choice for travel: carpooling in private cars or bus rides, the company said.
BlaBlaCar said that this decision was made for the platform as part of the overall development strategy.
“The Ukrainian bus market has great potential. Unlike European countries, the Ukrainian market consists of hundreds of bus operators. Many of them have their own business management system, which does not always meet the needs, since developing and maintaining such solutions is a rather expensive task. Carriers want to be engaged in transportation, not IT development. This is logical. At the same time, most of the companies, especially small ones, which still do business in Excel and even a notebook… We will offer carriers a technology with which they can provide an optimal online presence, optimize their business processes, focusing on the key tasks of their business, the quality of services provided for passengers and, as a result, increasing sales,” CEO of BlaBlaCar in Ukraine Oleksiy Lazorenko said.
In turn, the founder and CEO of Octobus, Ivan Kirov, added that for bus carriers the system will remain an independent tool for managing inventory and business processes, while existing BlaBlaCar partners will be able to use the service for free.
BlaBlaCar also announced raising a new EUR 97 million funding round. As the company said, the attracted investments will help maintain the current growth rates of the company, as well as develop the BlaBlaCar bus business, in particular in Ukraine. Among the company’s key objectives is to expand the network of bus partners and improve the platform to offer passengers a convenient and reliable way to buy tickets online.
BlaBlaCar is the world’s largest road travel marketplace (website and mobile app for iOS and Android) that brings together a trusted community of travel companions as well as official bus rides.
As of April 2021, the number of BlaBlaCar users exceeds 90 million in 22 countries.
The BlaBlaCar carpooling service has named Ukraine among top three countries in terms of the service development pace: in January-June 2019, the Ukrainian community of BlaBlaCar passed the five billion mark, the press service of the service has reported. According to the company’s information, the service community in the world reached 75 million users in 22 countries (3.4 million on average per country).
The company said that over the past two years, activity on the BlaBlaCar platform in Ukraine has grown by more than 150%, and daily dozens of thousands of people make trips.
“At peak times (Christmas, Easter holidays), over one million free places are published on the platform. Of these, 80% are trips across Ukraine, 20% are international (Poland, Germany, Czech Republic and other countries),” the company’s press service reported, noting that the service was the second among the platforms in Ukraine, where you can book a trip from a city to a city.
According to the company, the rapid growth of the platform was influenced by the increase in passenger traffic in million-plus cities (Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Lviv).
“Monthly service records more than 45,000 unique places of departure and arrival throughout Ukraine, which connect more than 90% of the country’s settlements. This is especially important for small towns and villages where there is no direct bus or train connection and which are far from major transportation hubs and highways,” BlaBlaCar said.
According to Zero Empty Seats, a global study into the environmental impact of carpooling, in 2018, carpooling saved more than 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 a year, including 245,000 tonnes in Ukraine.
The company plans to continue improving the product in Ukraine, and focusing on creating a marketplace for long-distance road trips.
“Combining the proposals of fellow travelers and bus routes on one platform will allow BlaBlaCar to become a global marketplace for making long-distance trips,” the company said.
