The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has made social distancing, may be better termed as physical distancing, the new normal for us. To help our society fight this unprecedented situation, maintaining a distance of 2 meters between two people has become the norm.

In the bus industry, we can contribute strongly by ensuring that social distancing is followed between passengers while travelling on the same bus. To keep the system running and also keeping the spread of the virus in control, this could also be imposed as regulation/rule from certain states or central government, after the lockdown is relaxed.

To execute this, bus operators can get support from their ticketing booking software. When the seat allocation is managed by GDS software provider; the same gets applied to all booking channels – OTA, branch, agent, or your website e-bookings. The OTAs like redBus, AbhiBus, Travelyaari etc. will need to make only a few changes to the customer experience during a booking transaction.

Seeing the need of the situation and understanding that seat allocation is best handled through your booking software, we have added a new feature. This will help you implement the Social Distancing Seating, irrespective of the channels you get booking from.

Probable social distancing rules

State governments can come up with their own rules for social distancing. At this moment, few regulations have started to come but are likely to evolve. In the given situation, we can only be prepared for all the current and future possibilities. The various possibilities could be:

1. Alternate rows should be empty.
2. Alternate seats should be empty.
   3. Alternate seats should be empty however, there need not be empty seats between family/known people .
   
   Implementation approach for the above scenarios
   
   
   The Social Distancing Configuration on Bitla can provide solutions for all the above possibilities. Let us understand the specifics depending on the social distancing rule which could become applicable.