The Greyhound intercity coach company has launched an online booking facility to allow passengers to book and pre-pay their coach tickets online.
The new online booking facility adds functionality to the Greyhound Web site (www.greyhound.co.za), which went live in May. The site also allows travellers to access information on routes, coach departure and arrival times, ticket prices, seat availability and company information.
Greyhound says the online booking facility is aimed at making travelling faster and easier for its 500 000 passengers a year. The company reports that it has been pleasantly surprised at the high number of people already accessing the site and booking online, particularly as no marketing has yet been undertaken.
Greyhound IT manager Mark Venter says: "The Web site front-end was developed by M-Web, based on Computicket`s model, with the back-end developed by Isis. The system is running on Sun Solaris servers, using an Oracle database. Transactions are secured with 128-bit encryption from Verisign."
In addition to ease of booking, the technology also allows Greyhound management to monitor demand using real-time information, allowing the company to make operational changes and add services to busy routes.
Greyhound says a great deal of thought went into the design and structure of the Web pages to ensure they would be as user-friendly as possible. The facility was not made available to consumers until Greyhound`s staff and agents had extensively tested it.
"This new reservations system gives strength to the company`s commitment to using the latest technology in order to achieve increasingly high levels of products and services," concludes Greyhound operations director Fanie van der Walt.
Share
