Transport comparators: discover BusRadar!

Although the name BusRadar may be confusing, like CheckMyBus, this comparator does not deal solely with bus offers! Since BusRadar launched at the same time as the liberalisation of bus transport following the loi Macron, this comparator only dealt with buses at the time. But that era is over, and its activity has now expanded to the train and carpooling markets.

The transport modes compared by BusRadar currently constitute the main thing it has in common with Tictactrip. Indeed, Tictactrip's search engine also compares train, bus and carpooling offers.

The concept of intermodality for a journey implies, first of all, that it can possibly be multimodal. A sea journey is therefore by definition not multimodal. Land journeys are, and can therefore all be served through intermodality! This is the act of combining different modes of transport to get from point A to point B. Your journey could then combine a train and then a bus, or a carpool and then a train, etc.

At BusRadar, this offer is not available. Indeed, this comparator only compares bus, train and carpooling offers but does not have the features to combine them and thus offer intermodality.

This is precisely the big difference between Tictactrip and BusRadar. Indeed, Tictactrip has made intermodality and smart combinations of transport offers its main strength, while no one else does this. This actually makes Tictactrip the pioneer in this transport combination feature. If you want to book any journey, it will be compared across train, carpooling and bus, and also analysed to offer you the cheapest and most advantageous option for you. Pretty cool, right?!

In-app/in-site purchases are not mandatory for a transport comparator. Not offering customers the ability to pay on its site doesn't make a comparator worse. Users are then redirected to partner companies' websites to book the ticket they've previously compared and chosen. The transport comparator then earns revenue based on the volume of redirections (people redirected) who bought a ticket.

BusRadar is currently a comparator that doesn't offer on-site purchases. All the bus, train and carpooling tickets you compare come from partner companies' offers and will redirect you, once you've made your choice, to the chosen company's website.

Right now, the same applies to us at Tictactrip, as we don't yet offer payment on our site. However, our tech teams have been hard at work for several months to offer payment directly on our site! On-site purchases on the Tictactrip ticket comparator will soon be possible. This is good news, especially for booking your future combinations and no longer being redirected to two or three different partner companies. It is with this goal of making your journey booking easier, and therefore your mobility, that we work.

Real-time price adjustment is a difficult part for transport comparators because it requires taking into account all the data from different transport companies. In other words, it's a nightmare. So, how can you organise things to offer real-time price adjustment in order to stay as close as possible to the actual price of the journey?

Unfortunately, BusRadar struggles with this aspect and with displaying real-time prices for the various buses on its site. The prices for the trips you compare will most likely no longer be the same by the time you book and pay. Often, these "stale" prices are revised upward.

At Tictactrip, we make customer experience a priority. We work hard to stay as close as possible to actual prices so we can offer you a consistent experience. We estimate that today less than 1% of bus journeys show a price difference between what is displayed in the results and what is shown at the time of payment.

Having covered the European coverage and the ground transport comparisons of the BusRadar and Tictactrip search engines, it's time to talk about national coverage!

BusRadar, originally a German company, didn't start out by serving France and doesn't make France one of its priorities; improving mobility in France is not its stated goal. However, at present, the BusRadar comparator has agreements with all the bus, train and carpooling companies in the French market. BusRadar's coverage therefore reaches all French bus stations, but goes even further! Indeed, small towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, such as Maule, are accessible thanks to BusRadar's search engine. BusRadar's coverage in France is therefore quite substantial.

Tictactrip, for its part, also holds the right to compare and combine offers from all companies in the French market. French bus stations are therefore also served by Tictactrip's services. In addition, we are today the only ones promoting, thanks to our smart combination algorithm, journeys from your home all the way to your ski resort! Finally, with the mission of connecting isolated areas, we work to improve and add every town to our search engine. There is still a long way to go, but it is starting to pay off, with more than 6,000 destinations in Europe and 3,500 in France.

The destinations served in Europe by BusRadar are not published on their website. To discover them, it's a bit of luck of the draw using their search engine with your departure city and the city you want to travel to. However, after using it, many cities turn out to be accessible, so there's a good chance the ones on your route will be there, but nothing is guaranteed 🤷🏻‍♂️.

At Tictactrip, we do everything to develop mobility accessible to French and European travellers. That's why our ultimate goal is to serve nearly all countries and cities in Europe. For now, we cover 31 of the 51 countries that make up the European continent. A pretty good start, right?!