Online travel agent Expedia India has signed a strategic partnership with the online bus ticket booking portal redBus.in to offer bus ticket booking service on its website. Through this partnership, Expedia said that it will get access to bus seat inventory across more than 180,000 bus services operated by 900 operators across the country, while redBus will power the bus ticketing functionality on the portal. It's worth noting that redBus also offers a 'Software as a Service' product for bus operators called BOSS (Bus Operator Software Services), which allows bus operators to manage their inventory in real time as well as manage bus schedules, allocate seats to specific agents or branch offices, manage ticket pricing on the service, route and date level and offer online booking on their website through their own payment gateway. When we checked, Expedia India was offering bus ticket booking through a dedicated section on its portal and the ticket booking interface is quite similar to the redBus.in ticket booking interface. While Expedia manages the ticket booking, the payment is processed by redBus through its partner payment gateway, CCAvenue. Expedia-Cleartrip Deal: In a related development, Expedia India may renegotiate its contract with the online travel booking site Cleartrip, since it no longer needs access to Cleartrip's low cost airline inventory, reports Livemint. According to the report, the company now plans to offer its own low-cost airline inventory by directly partnering with low-cost carriers. In an interview to the publication, Vikram Malhi, country head of Expedia India said that they initially partnered with Cleartrip to offer…
