It is one of the easiest ways to get around, yet travelling by bus in Cambodia can turn into a confusing experience.
With more than 60 bus operators in the capital, Phnom Penh, alone, the bus system can be hard to make sense of.
That is exactly where BookMeBus steps in.
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Founded in 2015, the platform was launched by 27-year-old Cambodian Langda Chea, who quit a tech job to build an online ticketing service after growing frustrated with how inefficient bus travel in Cambodia had become.
"In Cambodia, to buy tickets people had to travel very far and buy them at a counter," Chea says.
"You cannot just go to one place and find all the bus companies there... You have to go to different places to buy each bus ticket.
"We are trying to change the way people buy bus tickets in Cambodia."
A Game Changer
BookMeBus is a website and mobile app that lets passengers book bus and ferry tickets, as well as private taxi rides, from more than 30 operators across Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.
Users can compare schedules and prices, and book securely with a credit card.
"In Cambodia, travelling around the country by bus is very, very popular," Chea says.
"On the bus you can enjoy the view of the city and the countryside, things like buffaloes, rice fields and rivers."
These days, between 8,000 and 9,000 tickets are sold through BookMeBus every month, he says.
The Rise of E-commerce
But the journey has not been entirely smooth.
"E-commerce in Cambodia is quite new, it has only just appeared," Chea says. "Not many locals buy tickets online."
More than 90% of BookMeBus users are foreigners, he says.
Even so, Chea says his company now works with 60% of the bus operators in the country, and he hopes Cambodians will embrace the technology too.
"We thought selling online would be very difficult, because it is new for Cambodia," says Ith Chanda, a manager at Golden Bayon Express, a bus company that is one of BookMeBus's partners.
"But foreigners are used to it. Sales keep growing."
"We hope to expand our market by working with BookMeBus."
What's Next?
With the platform already up and running in several Asian countries, Chea has plans to grow the business further.
"When we started, we only thought about solving a problem for Cambodians, but now we are becoming more and more ambitious," he says.
"So we want to do more than just fix the problem in our own country. We think this kind of model could help other countries too, especially across the region."
