Johannesburg – Ticketpro, a leading ticketing company, has backed the embattled bus industry after adding long-distance bus tickets to its portfolio of products and services.
“We a re very excited to launch and add long-distance bus ticketing to our portfolio. It is part of our evolution and strategy in bringing ticketing to the people of South Africa, to make it easier, saving time, saving money and more convenient for South Africans to buy tickets for their bus trips to other provinces and even neighbouring countries,” said Brandon Duffield, managing director of Ticketpro.
In addition to tickets for trips between provinces, consumers can also buy tickets to travel to other southern African countries including Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Ticketpro is a member of Blue Label Telecoms group of companies. The bus and coach industry is one of the industries that took a hammering since the outbreak of coronavirus.
Greyhound and Citiliner have closed operations. Bus company Putco is also set to retrench 214 staff members as a result of financial distress. Bazil Govender, executive manager of the Southern African Bus Operators Association, said the industry was in trouble and the government needed to step in.
“During the lockdown phases companies still had to sustain costs and, in collaboration with Nedlac and Business for South Africa, the costs of compliance with safety protocols for Covid-19 were modelled from industry data obtained nationally and came out at R4 767 per bus per month, projecting costs for the bus industry to R102 728 850 per month.”
“The industry implores government and the Department of Transport to facilitate the speedy disbursement of the public transport operations conditional grant set aside for relief and to urgently mandate the correct entities to critically engage the industry stakeholders to prevent further job losses and closure of companies,” said Govender.
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