Hyderabad, 08th March 2021: Andhra Pradesh Panchayat elections held in 4 phases in Feb 2021 saw a record number of people traveling from various neighbouring cities. Trends mapped by AbhiBus.com, India’s fastest growing online marketplace for bus ticketing indicates that all roads led to various cities and rural areas of AP as the state witnessed over 80% turnaround of voters across all 4 phases.
Some of the tier-2 cities have shown a greater increase in seat booking that includes Kanigiri (400%), Tanuku (350%), Vijayanagaram (350%), Ravulapalem (280%), Annavaram (280%), Macherla (300%) amongst others compared to any other time of the year or the pre covid times too.
The top 5 cities from where the travel originated from was Hyderabad, Bangalore, Vishakhapatnam, Vijayawada and Chennai and the top 6 cities that people travelled to were Anantapur, Vijayawada, Ongole, Vishakhapatnam, Tirupati and Guntur.
Commenting on the trend Mr. Rohit Sharma, Chief Operating Officer, Abhibus.com said, “duty-bound voters ensured that they were not deterred by any reason to travel to their hometowns to cast their precious vote. As a result, we have seen a significant surge in travel to cities where the elections are being held on the eve of the election dates. Bus travel continues to be one of the safest modes of travel and has increasingly been a preferred choice of travellers.”
List of top 5 cities saw the most travel during the Panchayat elections:
Post Covid, up to 8,000 people book their bus tickets to AP per day, using the Abhibus app and website, on the specific election eve, witnessed over 20,000 bookings to various cities and villages of Andhra. Voters from Hyderabad was the highest number of travelers – AP bound bookings from Hyderabad alone witnessed a whopping 8,000+ booking while a typical daily bookings trend is 2-4K per day.
While the state election commission already announced the elections for 12 municipal corporations and 75 municipalities in Andhra Pradesh to be held on March 10th, it is set to be a travel busy week.
“With the announcements of dates for the upcoming state municipality elections and followed by-elections in different state elections we see a further boost to the bus travel, and we urge all our customers to exercise complete safety precautions on their travel to keep themselves and others risk-free and continue to fulfil their responsibility as model citizens and cast their votes”, added Rohit
We are already witnessing a 2x increase in bookings for AP for the March 10th municipality elections and in tune with trends we are witnessing the bookings are likely to go to 3x by 9th of March 2021.