Estonian company Mobifer offers a bus booking platform that makes booking buses easier and more transparent for both customers and bus companies. Concise helped Mobifer, as a development partner, build a fully automated booking system that connects customers and bus companies in real time.
“Our idea was the same as Booking.com for hotels. You don’t have to communicate with 10 hotels to get an overview of prices in the area and plan your accommodation. We wanted to create such a marketplace for bus companies as well,” explains Mobifer’s CPO Erkki Pärna.
Each order required manually responding to 10 requests
The idea for Mobifer was born in 2022 at Hansa Grupp, one of the largest providers of charter bus transport and public scheduled transport in the Baltic. In 2023, Concise was brought in as a development partner and began building the technical solution for the platform.
Before Mobifer, booking buses was ambiguous and time-consuming for both customers and bus companies:
- Bus companies had to respond to around 10 requests to receive each booking.
- Customers didn’t know whether the price offered to them was fair because there was no way to conveniently get an overview of all providers.
- bus companies used emails, Excel spreadsheets, and even notebooks to make reservations and manage trips.
Fully functional marketplace for charter transport
Mobifer, in collaboration with Concise, developed a complete solution with the following features:
- A charter transport marketplace where bus companies can upload their offers, prices, and images, and customers can make real-time inquiries and compare prices.
- An automatic pricing and search algorithm that analyzes prices and availability to display optimal offers.
- A mobile application for bus drivers, where the driver receives all trip information and customers can see the real-time movement of the bus and the estimated time of arrival.
- A modern user experience thanks to a front-end running on Next.js, which makes the user experience fast and smooth.
Concise developers essentially became full-fledged team members during the development. Erkki says that the collaboration works very well: “We expected the development partner to have an end-to-end mindset, that is, them actively thinking along. Of course, you expect a modern development methodology, and Concise is known for its super-agility. And naturally, the ability to scale to quickly add more developers if necessary. Basically, we can tell the developers which river we want to cross, and they suggest how to do it.”
Mobifer set a new standard for the charter market
Today, 1500 requests are made through Mobifer per week in Estonia and Latvia.
“We see a growth trend, and certain segments, such as schools, have received us very well in the market. Many operators work on the platform daily and understand its value and benefits. Of course, some companies haven’t digitalized their processes, and the transition is more difficult. We now want to expand to further markets to see if there is a similar usage model and whether our solution could work there too,” explains Erkki.
In addition to the convenience for customers and bus companies, one of Mobifer’s major goals was to make the market more transparent: “Bolt did this in the taxi industry, and we also wanted to reduce the shadow economy in the bus industry – which is still an issue. The other side was the digitalization of operators, so that instead of pen and notebook, they would start getting real benefit from their data.”
Innovation that came from within the industry
Hannu Kikkas, Concise’s Business Development Manager, says that they have never seen such a project on the Estonian market: “This is a completely new platform, and for me the most mysterious thing is that this innovation came from a bus operator itself. This is a very rare case in the Estonian market that someone sees an opportunity to offer added value, is ready to take it on in a big way and also find the resources to do so.”
Hannu states that technically, it is not a very complex platform, but rather, it was difficult to use all the optimization possibilities: “We realized that bus logistics is the biggest place where things can be optimized – for example, taking into account working time schedules or how bus operators calculate their route kilometers. With this knowledge, we can help other companies in the logistics sector even better.”
Are you interested in logistics solutions? We’re here to help. Get in touch, and let’s talk about your options. hello@concise.eu
