Dhaka, Bangladesh (BBN)-The Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr is the signal for Ramadan fasting to end and holiday partying to begin.
In Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, it also prompts an annual exodus, as millions rush to join family and friends for the most important festival of the year, said a blogpost published of Wall Street Journal.
According to the police, over five million people, or almost half of Dhaka’s population, leave the capital during the Eid holidays, putting tremendous strain on already clogged roads, railways and waterways.
This year was no exception. Bangladesh celebrated Eid last Saturday and in the four days preceding it an estimated two million passengers boarded buses, trains and ferries to leave the capital.
The journey is generally chaotic enough, but families desperate to spend Eid in their villages usually have an extra headache to contend with: uncertainty about whether they will be able to get a ticket. Such is the demand for tickets that it can take six hours to buy a ticket for a four-hour bus or boat journey.
Idris Ali, a 27-year-old salesman, wasn’t taking any chances. Sitting with his wife and two sisters on the upper deck of a double-decker ferry at Sadarghat, Dhaka’s bustling river port, on Friday evening, he described his daylong mission to ensure he got a ticket home.
Ali had traveled from his rented apartment in Dhaka’s northern Mirpur suburb in the morning and had been sitting on deck since then, waiting for the ferry to depart for the overnight journey to Barisal, his home district on the country’s southern coast.
“We came early because we had to buy tickets,” he said, as he squatted on a blanket spread on the wooden deck.
“It would be unthinkable not to go home to spend Eid with my parents.”
This year, though, a small e-commerce start-up began tackling Dhaka’s Eid exodus with an unprecedented innovation: online and mobile ticket sales.
The e-ticketing company, named Shohoz.com, which means “easy” in Bangla, is trying to banish the need to physically go to a ticket counter by offering tickets online through a website and a mobile app.
Customers can view listed bus and ferry schedules of different companies, compare fares, view seat availability and book tickets via mobile phone—the first such service in Bangladesh.
Shohoz was started by Harvard Business School alumna Maliha Quadir, who says business is booming—although it’s still a challenge to get some people to believe that a text message on a mobile phone can be their ticket home.
Not too much of a challenge, though: Transport companies allocated roughly a quarter of their total seats for this year’s Eid exodus to the e-commerce start-up.
The tickets were sold out within days, says Quadir, who gave up a corporate career in the US to set up Shohoz last year.
Nazrul Islam, a civil servant who used the service last week, said e-ticketing had taken the hassle and uncertainty out of the journey to his village in the coastal Barisal district.
He booked ferry tickets for his family of three on Shohoz’s website and had the tickets delivered to his house in Dhaka’s Azimpur neighborhood.
“It was surprisingly easy,” he said. “Before this, I had to set aside an entire day to go and get tickets—and even then you never know if seats are available until you get to the station.”
E-commerce is relatively new in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people where per-capita annual income stands at around $1,100.
Its potential is huge, though, given the proliferation of mobile phones and the growth of Internet use.
According to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, the total number of Internet users topped 45 million this year, up from 36 million in 2014.
More than 90 per cent of those are using mobile devices to access the Web.
The government has slashed bandwidth costs in recent months in an effort to spur Internet-based services and has introduced policies that have allowed mobile money transactions to boom.
Officials at Bangladesh Bank, the central bank, say average GDP-growth of nearly 6 per cent and rapid urbanization in Bangladesh have contributed to the emergence of a middle class, which is expected to provide fertile ground for e-commerce, something start-ups such as Shohoz are keen to exploit.
Eid is not only the season for family get-togethers, but also a time for shopping sprees, meaning commuters faced a perfect storm of holiday gridlock last week.
Farzana Ahmed, a banker in Dhaka’s upscale Gulshan neighborhood, says she beat the traffic and the long queues by doing her Eid shopping online.
“I had to buy some sarees for myself and shirts for my husband,” she said. “I paid with a credit card and the clothes were delivered to my house. That wouldn’t have been possible a couple of years ago.”
According to the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a trade group, Eid sales total around 150 billion taka ($1.9 billion), mostly consisting of clothes, shoes and jewelry.
Online shopping accounts for just 400 million taka, but sales are growing rapidly as well-heeled customers choose e-commerce sites over brick-and-mortar stores, says Shameem Ahsan, president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, an umbrella group of information technology companies.
Big challenges remain. Fewer than 30 per cent of Bangladeshis have a bank account and just nine million have a credit or debit card. Most people are still wary of using their cards for online transactions over security concerns.
Shohoz accepts mobile money transfers such as bKash as well as credit and debit cards. Maliha Quadir says that although habits are changing, her company still maintains a cash-on-delivery option where a motorcycle courier delivers a printout to the customer’s doorstep.
“It will take time,” she said. “These are big changes, both for the transportation companies and the consumers.”
Shohoz has rolled out an aggressive advertising strategy in recent months, including TV spots and a publicity campaign that has placed hundreds of thousands of Shohoz stickers on cars and buses in Dhaka.
The company has developed ticketing software that is synchronized with the system used by major bus companies, Quadir says.
Shohoz makes money by charging just 20 taka—25 U.S. cents—per seat. For a home delivery, there is an additional charge of 50 taka.
The market is price-sensitive and it remains a volume business.
“It’s called Shohoz.com meaning it’s easy,” says Ms. Quadir, “but it’s [still] very complex to execute Shohoz.” But, she adds, “digitizing an extremely challenging industry—plus the fact that this is bringing a digital dividend to the masses—is what makes Shohoz interesting.”
BBN/SK/AD