Behind One Timetable: How Bus Companies, Agencies and Booking Sites Work Together

When you tap a seat on our site and pay for it, a small chain of organisations has just agreed on something. The company that owns the coach has sold a seat. We have recorded it, taken the payment and issued the ticket. Perhaps a travel agency or a partner website was where you actually started. It is worth understanding how these pieces fit, partly because it explains why some things work the way they do, and partly because you might be on the other side of the counter one day.

The operator runs the coach

Everything begins with the bus company. It owns the vehicles, employs the drivers, holds the licences for the route and decides the timetable, the stops, the fares and the rules. When it sells through us, it puts all of that into our system once, and from then on it manages its own schedule, prices and seats from its own login. The seat you see is the operator's seat, priced by the operator, and when you buy it the operator is told immediately and the driver's list for that departure updates. Nothing is resold, nothing is estimated. There is one inventory and everyone reads from it.

We put every operator in one place

Our job is the timetable that spans all of them. A search for a city pair asks every operator running it for that day's departures and shows them together, with the same information laid out the same way, so a traveller can compare on what matters rather than on whose website was easiest to find. We take the payment, hold the seat while you pay, issue the ticket in the route's language and in English, send the reminders, host the reviews and answer the questions. In return we keep a commission from the fare, agreed with each operator in advance. The traveller pays the operator's price, not the operator's price plus something.

Agencies and partners sell from the same shelf

Many people in the region still prefer to book through a travel agency, in person or by phone, and many agencies sell through us. An agency has its own account, sees the same seats you do and books them on your behalf, and the ticket you receive is identical. Other websites and apps plug into our inventory through a programming interface and sell the same seats under their own name. Whichever door you come through, it is the same shelf, so a seat cannot be sold twice and a price cannot differ by channel.

What this means for you

It means the coach you book is real, the seat is really held, and the price is the operator's own. It means a change the operator makes to a departure reaches you, because there is one place it needs to change it. And it means the ratings you read were written by people who bought the same seat you are buying.

And if you are an operator, an agency or a developer

The door is open. Bus companies can list their routes and sell to an audience across fifteen languages and a growing list of countries without building anything themselves. Agencies can book for their customers with a proper account, settlement and reporting. Developers can integrate the timetable and the booking flow into their own product. Each of these has its own page on our site with the details, and a real person at the end of the contact form. The timetable is better for everyone when more of the region is on it.