Many travel enthusiasts are already familiar with flight and hotel aggregator sites such as Aviasales and RoomGuru. Booking and buying tickets / hotels via the Internet is becoming more and more popular, therefore, others are gradually catching up to the above services. For example, the Busfor website for buying bus tickets online.
Long distance bus travel has long been popular around the world. Those who have traveled independently in Asia have probably noticed this. It is also a popular form of transport, both in Europe and in Russia. But for me personally, the experience of several trips to the Black Sea from Moscow by bus was so-so, it was painful to come across ancient transport, that is, the intercity bus service is developed, but not comfortable. Soon I want to try to go through Busfor, I hope they sell tickets from more or less normal carriers.
The content of the article
Busfor.ru service
What is it and why
Busfor is a site for finding tickets from different bus carriers. That is, it is an aggregator where you can online book and buy tickets for long-distance buses in Russia, neighboring CIS countries, such as Ukraine and Belarus, and in Europe. Now the service works with more than 500 carriers.
By analogy with services for the search for air and railway tickets, hotels, Busfor does not transport passengers itself, but only provides the opportunity to search and buy tickets, it is not responsible for the quality of buses and service.
There are many negative reviews about the service ... And the problem is not in the service itself, but in the carriers. On the one hand, all claims must be made to the bus companies themselves, on the other hand, it is Busfor that acts as their representative. But! In Russia, in principle, the quality of bus transportation is low, I have already traveled several times before (not via Busfor) ... There are no normal carriers! When you buy a bus ticket at the bus station at the ticket office, you generally buy a pig in a poke, since the ticket office will not tell you what kind of service you will receive. And on Busfor at least there is a choice of specific carriers, so just read the reviews. However, this applies to any buses that from Busfor,
what from others.
The price of a bus ticket is lower than that of a plane or train. But the minus of bus travel is the long travel time in a sitting position. By bus you can get to European cities such as Prague or Berlin, but it will take two days. The price of a ticket is quite low 2500-4500 on average for international flights and 1000-1500 for intercity flights in Russia.
Busfor service - how to buy a bus ticket online
Interface
The service interface is intuitive and very simple, you can easily figure out how to find and order tickets. On the main page, we immediately see in the middle a ticket search form, where you just need to fill in the fields and click the Find ticket button.
At the top of the main page there is a link to the My tickets page (this section will be discussed below) and support contacts (phone, e-mail). By going to My tickets you can view your order history and manage your booking. Authorization at the entrance to the section occurs by the phone number that you indicate when booking a ticket.
Popular routes and countries
In the middle of the main page you can see Popular destinations with prices for domestic and international destinations.
Basically, all popular routes are from Moscow, which is not surprising. And they lead to Krasnodar, Sochi, Voronezh, Kazan. International to Kiev, Minsk, Tbilisi, Riga, etc. But this does not mean that all flights are only from Moscow, no. There are a lot of them all over Russia and between those cities that are very far from the capital, for example, from Perm or Chelyabinsk.
Popular destinations on Busfor.ru
At the bottom of the main page, you can see all flights by country at once: Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia. There is also an inconspicuous link All countries at the bottom of this block, clicking on which, you can see a list of all countries in general. There are more than 30 of them, European and Asian.
All countries
There is even Thailand on the list. However, if you follow the link, there is no information on popular flights on the page of this country. But if you go to a more popular country, there will be a ticket search form on top (as on the main page), flights to different cities of this country, a map of the country, brief information about it and popular destinations in this country at the very bottom.
Perhaps, in the future, the service will make it possible to draw up a route on a map. Because if you already know the name of the city, it’s easier to drive it into the form right away, and if you don’t know, it’s more convenient to look at its location..
FAQ section on the Busfor website
The service is new, so at the very bottom of the pages it has a menu, where in the Users section there is a Questions and Answers item. There you can find information about the service in the form of answers to the most frequently asked questions. Here is a direct link to this section..
How to buy a bus ticket online through Busfor
Filling out the search form
As you can see, the ticket search form is on several pages, not only on the main one. It is very convenient. Anywhere - on «The main», On the page «Schedule», On the page «All countries», we drive in the points of departure and destination, the date and number of people, we press the button Schedule and prices and see the result - a list of all carriers with prices, departure and arrival times. Results can be sorted by all parameters - departure time, arrival time, travel time, cost.
If there are no tickets for the selected date, the service will show the nearest date in the specified direction they are available. If you click More details in the line with one of the search results, you can see the details of the route. If such information from the carrier is available, the brand of the bus and the address of the bus departure are written there, among other things..
Booking and buying tickets
In the search results, click Select, we see the layout of the seats on the bus. Not all carriers have this option, some places do not allow you to choose in advance. Free places are highlighted in green. We choose.
Next, you need to fill out a simple form, where, in addition to your full name, you specify a telephone number for communication, where the reservation will come, an email. You also need to select an identity document, its series and number.
Errors are allowed in the name or surname, as well as in the number or series of the passport, but if there are many errors, you need to contact the service support.
After filling out the form, press the button Go to payment. Now you need to choose a payment method. You can pay for tickets online: by any bank card, through the Leader payment system, PayPal or using Qiwi through a virtual wallet.
You can also pay in the old fashioned way in cash through the Qiwi terminal. In this case, you must indicate the phone number, the same one that was indicated when placing an order on the Busfor website. With some carriers, you can choose to pay at the checkout. Then the ticket after the order remains reserved for some time. How much - will be written on the site after choosing the option «Pay at the checkout». To redeem a ticket at the box office of the carrier company, you must say the reservation number and the date of departure.
The ticket price includes compulsory insurance valid during the trip.
After paying for the ticket, an email with an electronic ticket will be sent to the e-mail address you provided..
Section My tickets and boarding the bus
In the My tickets section, you can view the history and status of all your orders.
To board the bus, the ticket will need to be printed. Under the conditions of some carriers, an exchange form may still come to the post office, which must be printed and exchanged at the ticket office of the bus station for a real ticket. A roughly similar situation with railway tickets, when not every train can be taken only with a printout and you need to receive a ticket on a form at the box office.
As I said, you can see the address of the bus station from where the bus will go, even before payment, in the list of search results. Several carriers usually travel from Moscow and choosing between them, we also choose the place of departure. Often it is: Shchelkovsky bus station, bus station at metro Krasnogvardeyskaya, new bus station Yuzhnye Vorota, bus station at Novoyasenevskaya, etc..
If you need to contact the carrier, you can see his contacts in your ticket, or contact the Busfor website support service.
Remember that according to the rules, you can take 1 piece of baggage with you up to 25 kg in weight, with dimensions up to 60 x 60 x 40 cm. You can carry baggage up to 5 kg in your hand luggage free of charge. In other cases, at the ticket office of the bus station you need to buy a ticket for luggage.
Return tickets
The bus ticket can be returned if necessary. To do this, go to the My tickets section, select the ticket you want to return, indicate the reasons for the return and click the Return button. The money for the returned tickets will be returned within 10 working days. How much will be returned depends on the conditions of the carrier and the time remaining before the trip.
But you need to take into account that if the ticket was not electronic, and an exchange form came to the post office, then you will have to return it through the carrier. Not s
P.S. After taking the bus, I will update the post or write a new one. It is clear that ideally you need to take a corporate flight to St. Petersburg, but I need to go to Krasnodar and beyond. In any case, experience with even one carrier will be indicative of how they approach the choice of carriers.
