Editor’s Note: This commentary for Bus & Motorcoach News was written by Axel Hellman, co-founder of OurBus. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bus & Motorcoach News or United Motorcoach Association.
Ten years ago, I met with the owner of a small bus company to discuss launching scheduled line-run service. The owner quickly explained why it wouldn’t work.
“To run a line, you need at least four departures a day: morning, afternoon, evening, and night. We only have four buses.”
That was the conventional wisdom at the time. The need for frequency, scale, and capital meant that line-run service was largely limited to the industry’s biggest and most established companies.
I suggested a different approach.
Instead of assuming the operator needed four daily departures, what if we used demand data to identify the days and times when passengers were most likely to travel and started with only those trips? The operator already knew how to run buses. What they lacked wasn’t operational expertise; it was a lower-risk way to identify demand, sell tickets, and reach customers.
That conversation captured exactly the opportunity Narinder Singh and I saw when we started OurBus in 2016. Narinder brought decades of experience across transportation and logistics. I was completing a master’s degree in transportation planning at the University of Southern California, studying how transportation networks develop and where service gaps exist. We believed technology could lower the barriers that had traditionally made scheduled service difficult for smaller operators.
Industry’s skill gap
That wasn’t just one operator’s experience. When we started, many of those business functions were still underdeveloped across the industry. Some operators didn’t offer reservations at all, and having a ticket didn’t necessarily guarantee a seat. Customer service was often limited to business hours, even though many trips departed early in the morning, late at night, or on weekends. Dynamic pricing was beginning to emerge, but fixed fares remained the norm, limiting operators’ ability to respond to changes in demand.
As we expanded from commuter service into intercity service, we saw the same pattern repeatedly. Many operators had the operational expertise to run scheduled service, but succeeding in today’s line-run market also required capabilities such as reservation systems, e-commerce and digital marketing. Those weren’t traditionally core functions for most bus operators.
These days, travelers increasingly begin with a destination rather than a bus company. They compare pickup locations, schedules, prices and travel times online before deciding which service to use. That creates an opportunity for established operators to reach customers well beyond their traditional audiences, but it also requires expertise that many smaller companies don’t want to build and manage internally.
Our role is to provide that commercial expertise while operators remain focused on transportation. We support customer acquisition, digital marketing, e-commerce, pricing, payment processing, and passenger communications. The operators we work with bring the buses, drivers, safety systems, maintenance expertise and local knowledge that we do not possess. The model works because those strengths complement one another.
As Dayna Hicks, CEO of Bethany Line Tours, put it:
“Working with OurBus has allowed Bethany Line Tours to grow into scheduled line-run service in a way that would have been much harder to do alone. We stay focused on operating safe, reliable transportation while OurBus provides the technology, customer reach, and demand data that help make new routes possible. It’s helped us reach new passengers, test new opportunities and grow our business.”
Hicks said the greatest challenge for many growing operators isn’t running buses; it’s gaining access to passengers and entering scheduled service without having to build every commercial capability independently.
Recognizing unmet demand
The same approach has also opened the door to markets that do not fit the traditional pattern of daily, year-round service. College breaks, seasonal tourism, sporting events, and smaller communities often create concentrated travel patterns that can support service on particular days or during specific times of the year. Listening closely to travelers — and organizing that demand — is often the key to identifying those opportunities.
Another conversation illustrated how differently we approached those markets. An operator asked how we had secured a contract to transport students at a particular university.
“We didn’t,” I told her.
There wasn’t a contract. Students and their families had been requesting the route, so we dug deeper, connected with the community, and built service around demonstrated demand. The college wasn’t paying us, and it didn’t need to. The community itself created enough demand to make the route work.
That experience reinforced another lesson we’ve learned over the past decade: demand doesn’t always come from institutions. Sometimes it comes directly from the people operators want to serve. By helping identify and activate that demand, operators can enter markets that might never have been viable through traditional contracting.
That’s especially valuable where large numbers of people travel at the same time but demand is limited during the rest of the year. An asset-heavy company may struggle to dedicate vehicles to those markets year-round, while an asset-light model can match concentrated demand with available capacity from operators we work with.
Finding opportunities
Over the past decade, OurBus has worked with more than 400 bus companies across North America. We’ve helped generate nearly $250 million in revenue for independent operators, with more than 80 percent of platform revenue flowing directly to the operators we work with.
The opportunity is to grow the market by reaching customers they may not already be serving while improving the performance of trips already underway. That opportunity takes different forms. For some operators, it means filling additional seats on an existing departure. For others, it means entering line-run service for the first time, reaching a new customer demographic, or testing a route without committing an entire fleet and marketing organization upfront.
The next decade will bring further changes in how passengers discover and purchase transportation. Artificial intelligence will continue to influence travel planning, search, customer service and pricing, just as online booking and dynamic pricing changed the industry over the past decade. Operators should be able to benefit from those developments without having to become software companies themselves.
The central opportunity remains much the same as it was in 2016. Thousands of small and midsized operators have the equipment, experience and local knowledge to provide excellent service. What many need is a practical way to identify demand, enter new markets and bring passengers to their buses.
Scheduled line-run service no longer has to be limited to companies with the largest fleets, terminal networks, and deep marketing budgets. With the right technology and commercial support, more operators can participate in a part of the industry that was once largely out of reach.
Axel Hellman is a transportation industry expert and co-founder of OurBus, a technology-driven regional travel marketplace connecting more than 100 U.S. cities and towns through intercity and commuter bus service.
Photos courtesy of OurBus
