- 4 months ago
As Malaysia gears up for Visit Malaysia 2026, redBus, led by CEO Prakash Sangam, is expanding travel access beyond big cities, boosting local economies, and shaping a more inclusive and dynamic tourism ecosystem.
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00:00Malaysia is gearing up for Visit Malaysia 2026, a major tourism push expected to surge in domestic and international travellers.
00:17And in this landscape, mobility and transport play a crucial role in ensuring seamless and connectivity is inclusive.
00:25One of the key players is Redbus, which has grown significantly since entering Malaysia in 2015 and is now expanding to travel ferries, travel activities and now focus on Culinary Focused Foodmap Initiative.
00:38And today, we speak with Prakash Sangam, Chief Executive Officer of Redbus to help us understand how the platform is opening access to hidden destinations, supporting local economies and shaping the dynamic and more inclusive tourism ecosystem ahead of VM2026.
00:57Thank you very much, Prakash, for joining us.
01:00All right, firstly, since entering Malaysia in 2015, Redbus has been expanding, has been expanding rapidly.
01:08What are some of the specific factors, whether partnerships, regulatory sports and consumer behaviour, which has been the most critical to that growth?
01:18So, we entered, like you said, we entered Malaysia in 2015 and one of the key characteristics of the market in Malaysia was that there was a fair bit of digitisation amongst bus operators, right?
01:34So, just to explain to your viewers, Redbus is a marketplace for intercity buses.
01:41We don't own or operate our own buses, what we do is that we connect bus operators and their inventory to customers or passengers, right?
01:52Bus travellers.
01:53So, we are a technology marketplace, a technology intermediary.
01:58And as a technology player, it becomes easier for us if the suppliers, which is here, are the bus operators, if they're already digitised.
02:08In some of the other markets that we operate, we find that the levels of digitisation are lower, so it takes a while for getting all these bus operators to come online, right?
02:19But Malaysia already had quite a good digital penetration amongst bus operators.
02:26So, it was easy for us to plug in and get a lot of inventory onto our platform quite easily.
02:33And what happens as a result of that is that customers also start seeing a lot more options, right?
02:42They start seeing many more options if they are to travel, let's say, from KL to Penang, they are able to see a lot more operators, their inventory, they are able to compare across schedules, they can compare prices, and they can choose their bus very conveniently and they can proceed, right?
03:01So, the digitisation of the market really helped, and on the consumer side, on the traveller side, again, smartphone penetration was quite good.
03:11We found that as we entered this market that a very large part of people who travelled by buses in Malaysia are the student community, right?
03:20And students are anyway, a lot more digitally savvy, they are like digital natives almost, the generation that is growing up now.
03:28So, they were also able to very quickly adapt and adopt online ticketing, right?
03:34So, these are two factors that helped us grow and scale our business a lot.
03:39The other thing that we found in Malaysia was that we had a very, very good set of bus operators who were very keen to get technology solutions that would help their business grow.
03:52So, we were able to partner with more than 200 bus operators, and by virtue of making their inventory available online on a unified platform, and by making it easy for customers to book tickets, we helped grow the market, right?
04:09So, that helped bus operators get higher occupancy, and therefore higher revenue and profitability, and that helped them to further invest in newer services, in newer buses, and grow the market some more.
04:28So, these are some of the factors that have helped us grow our business in Malaysia.
04:33And we understand that Malaysia is one of your strongest international markets.
04:39What unique lessons from this exercise could be replicated in other countries to strengthen digital adoptions and travel connectivity?
04:48You're absolutely right that Malaysia is our single most important international market at this point,
04:57purely because, in fact, in Malaysia, we enjoy a higher share of all the ticket bookings than what we have in our home market, which is India, right?
05:09So, I'm very thankful to the Malaysian public, the traveling public, and our partners in Malaysia to have embraced Redbus very wholeheartedly, right?
05:21And given us the privilege of being a market leader in this market, one of the few things that we have learned, one of the few important things that we have learned from our experience in Malaysia is one is around being very, very local, right?
05:37Being able to understand the local sentiments, being able to understand the local market, and incorporate that both into our product offerings, and as well as our communication.
05:46So, for example, in India, for instance, a regular customer looks to travel between two cities, they would say that I want to travel from, let's say, Mumbai to Bangalore, right?
06:01But we found that in Malaysia, people wanted to travel between, let's say, TBS to a little India in Singapore, right?
06:10So, they had a very locality to locality search, whereas in India, people would search city to city, right?
06:15So, we had to adapt our platform to cater to what people wanted locally in the market.
06:21And secondly, while we know that English is well-spoken and is a well-accepted language in Malaysia, still, there are people who are more comfortable with Malay.
06:35So, we adapted our interface to be also available in Malay language.
06:41The third thing, from a localization standpoint, very early on, we figured that there are some very nuances, the way Malaysians talk, for instance, and the real reason why people use an online interface for booking tickets is that they're able to reserve their seat.
06:59They're able to block their seat in advance.
07:00And we understood that a very colloquial term for that is chuk, right?
07:05So, we use that in our communication early on, just to make a better connect with the local population.
07:14So, localization has been one big learning for us from Malaysia, adapting our products, adapting our communication.
07:21The second big learning for us has been how the entire ecosystem in Malaysia supports the growth of the industry.
07:29And we have really learned this by being active participants.
07:34So, here we interact not just with our bus operator partners, but we also interact with multiple other players.
07:42We are in conversation with APARD.
07:44We are in conversation with the terminals, their management.
07:49We are in conversation with the people who manage the IT with terminals and other IT service providers in the market.
07:56So, we have seen that in order to grow the overall market, it is important to draw upon the experiences and draw upon the wisdom of the ecosystem and work along with them for promotion and growth of the market.
08:15That is another critical learning that we have gone from Malaysia, that we want to take to other markets as well.
08:24And to put the point on localization, our new initiative about the Red Bus Food Map is also stemming from that insight, because we know that Malaysians are very, very passionate when it comes to food.
08:40That's a very strong driver for people to travel, when they travel to having new cuisines, there is so much of regional variety in the kind of food that is made.
08:51Every province seems to have its own kind of star dish, you could call it that.
08:58And there are some hidden gems in terms of restaurants that serve those dishes.
09:04So, we wanted to bring this alive in the form of Red Bus Food Map and put that out and inspire people to explore the rich culture and heritage of Malaysia through food, inspire people to travel and also make this a community-led initiative.
09:21Where while we have done some curation, we also think that there are a lot of other hidden restaurants or dishes that we may not know, but local people know, right?
09:33So, it's a platform, a food map where people can log into the platform and contribute their suggestions.
09:40And even that is something that we then incorporate onto the food map.
09:43So, we want to make this a living directory of all the rich food treasures that are in Malaysia and enable people an easy way of accessing them and enjoying that.
09:55And enjoying access to one of the local foods and sometimes it's a space or base in hidden destinations, locations and many travelistic simulations, urban centers.
10:08How is Red Bus expanding travel access to less surf destinations and what opportunities do you see in the rural and secondary routes?
10:20Right.
10:20So, as internet penetration is growing day by day, there is an opportunity to both digitize the inventory as you go down to tier 2, tier 3 towns,
10:32as well as encourage customers to use online ways of transaction, right?
10:39So, what we are particularly focused on going forward in Malaysia is that we have got very good connectivity on all the top towns, right?
10:48But so, if it comes to KL or EPO or Malacca, Penang, things are well connected.
10:56But how do we go down towards the even smaller towns, towns, which are possibly not as online penetrated as in Eastern Malaysia.
11:07So, we have expanded over the last 2, 3 years.
11:10We have really expanded our presence in Eastern Malaysia and connected a lot of towns like KT, Kuantan and stuff like that.
11:18And now we are going to tier 2 and 3 or 3 towns, including smaller towns like Jirantut, for example, or Jalavad.
11:27So, these are towns that we are getting into in terms of connectivity.
11:30And apart from that, we see a big opportunity in Sabah and Saravag, right?
11:34Because we have been, again, a bit, you know, the connectivity options there has not increased as much there as it's on the mainland.
11:44So, we are now onboarding a lot of bus operators in Sabah and Saravag and building connectivity options.
11:52And the second part is, again, going back to your question about what have we learned from Malaysia.
11:57What we learned from Malaysia is also about the value of multimodal transport.
12:02Because we understood that Southeast Asia, Malaysia being one of the countries there, even waterways, ferries are an important form of transportation, right?
12:13So, therefore, our platform is now extended to offer ferries as well, and therefore, offer seamless connectivity where people have to travel.
12:23They can take the bus and then take a ferry, right?
12:26And this is something that, again, we are replicating in other Southeast Asian countries.
12:30So, this is how we are looking to expand the footprint and going into more parts of the country, which are probably so far has been less in terms of connectivity and also in terms of online penetration and improving our presence there.
12:50So, this is also helping us connect to international destinations.
12:55So, for example, we are able to connect Malaysia to some parts of Thailand.
13:00From Sabah, we are able to connect Malaysia to parts of Indonesia.
13:05And, of course, the Singapore-Malaysia corridor has always been strong.
13:08So, these are, again, ways in which we are kind of expanding our network of coverage.
13:12Expanding connectivity, we know that tourism growth requires a lot of collaborations between multiple parties, multiple stakeholders.
13:24For example, that, how are you engaging with local bus operator, tourism bots, and even stakeholders to align with Malaysia's VM2026 goals, especially?
13:35Yeah, with bus operators, we are constantly engaging with them, apart from the fact that we distribute their inventory and, and therefore, give them additional sales.
13:49We also engage with them by giving them a lot of detailed insights about their business, right?
13:55And we give them a lot of tools as well.
13:57So, for example, we have a dynamic pricing platform because supply and demand is not uniform across the year.
14:03There are times when there is less demand in the market, and there are times when there is big demand in the market.
14:10So, how does, how do operators manage their yield in such a way that they're able to maximize their yield even on low demand seasons and, and, and also maximize their yield in high demand seasons, right?
14:23So, we have a dynamic pricing product that we have given to bus operators to enable them to manage their pricing appropriately.
14:31The second thing that we do is that we have a very, very robust ratings and review platform.
14:37So, we end up collecting a lot of ratings from every customer who has taken a trip with us, using the Redbus booking system.
14:46So, we ask them for how the journey has been, right?
14:49And we collect these insights and provide it to bus operators with a very detailed and rich insight generation to help them understand where are they doing well with respect to customer expectations and where, where can they do even better?
15:05Where are they falling short?
15:06And, and this helps bus operators to improve the levels of their service and, and, and overall give a better customer experience, right?
15:14Mm-hmm
15:15Um, uh, then we, of course, uh, do partnership with, with, with, with government to promote, uh, lesser known, uh, uh, destinations.
15:25So, uh, for example, uh, Penang Hill trains, we have onboarded that as an attraction because apart from bus tickets and ferry tickets, we also have, uh, uh, things to do or activities on a platform that people can book.
15:40So, uh, uh, even there, we, uh, our, our, our focus has been to really, uh, go to activities, which are not the ones, which are very popularly known in, in, in, in, in, uh, cities like KL, because that is something that, uh, everyone, uh, kind of, uh, uh, understands it's already available, but we have, um, gone and, and got a lot of activities in very, very small towns.
16:08Uh, we have got like, uh, uh, uh, jungle wala in, in Langkawi, for instance, we have a, uh, adventure trip, we have a, uh, in, in Thailand to Songkla one day trip that we promote, uh, we have a ATV Kiao adventure in, in, in, in Sabah, for instance.
16:26Um, uh, so these are, uh, you know, there's a drawbridge in Terengganu, for instance, as an attraction that is not that popular or well known.
16:35So we have, we have, we have on board some of these attractions on the platform to really cater to people who are, uh, traveling, uh, by buses in tier two, tier three towns and, and, uh, and drive, you know, travel to even, uh, lesser known destinations.
16:52All right. With initiatives spanning ferries, travel activities, and even the food map, we can see that Redbus shows how transport innovation can align with Malaysia's national tourism goals.
17:02Again, I would say thank you very much to Prakash, Prakash Sanggam, the Chief Executive Officer of Redbus, for sharing your insight, and we look forward to seeing how Redbus continues to expand travel access and support the growth of the, of one country.
17:17Again, I would say thank you very much, and all of our discussion here will be featured in astronomy.com and across all social media platforms.
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