tix.hr: bus ticketing across Europe, online and on the road

The problem

Črnja Tours was launching international bus lines from scratch, with no ticketing system in place. Seats had to be sold online, at dozens of agencies and by drivers on board.

Every ticket had to be fiscalized and every cash payment accounted for.

What we built

A central booking engine is the single source of truth for every seat. It routes passengers through transfer hubs the way an airline does.

A ticket can’t print until its booking is recorded centrally. That closed the loophole of switching a device off mid-print to skip depositing the cash.

• Online sales with card payment. The seat is held for 15 minutes at checkout.
• Agencies and drivers sell from handheld Android POS devices that print fiscalized tickets on the spot.
• The first version paired phones with Bluetooth printers. We later moved the fleet to all-in-one Sunmi handhelds with built-in printers.
• Partner platforms like Distribusion and GetByBus sold seats through our API. Some issued tickets in real time; others got an allocation of seats, synced their sales later and requested more seats when they ran out.
• Fares followed the competition through a price-monitoring table with manual approval.

Results

• 100,000+ tickets issued in 2018 alone, up to 950 a day.
• 26 lines and 13+ buses, with transfers through Zagreb to Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Slovakia and Italy.
• 50+ points of sale: online, at agencies and on board.
• ~90 ms booking response time.
• No ticket without a booking, so no cash leaking at the point of sale.
• 3.5 years in production, including one major rewrite.