State-of-the-art Road Travel services?

Past few days, there has been a flutter in travel circles with Raj National Express announcing Rs. 99 fare from Pune to Mumbai - fine print being that it is only for limited time. In any case, the company is likely to kickstart the competition in the road travel sector - at least in Pune-Mumbai route.

The current services are pretty bad (confort-wise), even though the available schedules are good (every 15 min.). A popular private player provides very cramped space between the seats. This insensitive player also numbers all the seats so that "1" starts from somewhere middle, so if you select 15/16 as a good seat, it is actually one of the last ones. (Initial seats are named "A" to "N" or so.)

It was interesting to find an ad of Raj National in one of the channels (as running ticker bar) - probably first time for any travel player. The site was prominently displayed. Visiting the site made you believe that it is indeed of the standard of airline players (with online booking and all that). But unfortunately it took only a few clicks to realize that it is just a template and a static site (complete with a "Verisign" logo, which of course is just a image). The agency probably doesn't know the value of attention generated from the ad!

Let us all hope something good happens in this sector in coming days...

NGPay - J2ME based mobile payment solution

Deccan Air, India's "Innovative" airline (and, of course, often low-cost too!) introduced mobile phone based booking solution. I came to know of it today, even though the information went around the newspapers during July (for example, see this blog entry from Mobile Pundit).

NGPay seems to be very interesting solution. From what I read in FAQs (they don't yet have a site as of now), you first provide your credit card info in secure wallet, and they use it when you book the tickets. I guess they verify the transaction directly with the bank using secure lines. They create multiple associations with various merchants - Airlines, Movie theaters etc. And we win, because the overall booking experience is integrated and available from mobile. And this is indeed a way to go; because you want your regular transactions - such as ticket bookings and bill payments - at tip of your fingers at any time. Other type of interactions, such as shopping on internet, are occassional and can be done online using a computer. (In any case, mobile experience for a random site is not predictable.)

From security point of view, the credit card info would only pass via mobile and NGPay systems, and perhaps directly to banks via secure channels. (NGPay would have to build reputation, and they better have solid systems.) So nice thing for us, end users.

The scalability is of course a problem: How quickly can they add merchants. I would subscribe to standard set of merchants that I normally deal with - using a computer. Mobile UI becomes manageable and predictable. (Otherwise, with 100's of merchants, the mobile UI becomes limiting.)

So, overall, a killer app. But last few months haven't shown much traction. (No more news in papers, for e.g.). I am betting on this solution, and I feel it is just a matter of some advertizement or mouth-publicity.