From a ticketing scam he suffered, Hakiza built Uganda’s largest online bus ticketing portal

As they say, a wise man sees fortune out of despair, a young man turned around a fake bus ticket that he had been sold to into the country’s largest bus ticketing portal to ensure no more people fall prey to scammers.

In 2015, a 25-year-old young Ronald Hakiza was travelling to Kisoro in the South Western part of the country to attend a burial and fell prey to conmen who sold him a fake bus ticket and only realized this aboard the bus.

“As I approached Namayiba bus park, a man walked up to me and suggested he could sell a bus ticket at a relatively cheaper price. I didn’t think about it and straightaway brought the ticket for I had saved some money,”Hakiza narrates his story.

He says that boarding the bus, he was excited for he had bought a cheaper ticket as this had enabled him save some money.

As they say, don’t count eggs before they hatch, the young man had been quick to jubilate over the cheap bus ticket because things were to turn around for him in a blink of the eye.

He narrates that a few minutes into the journey, the bus conductor started inspecting all passengers to check for the tickets and when his turn came, he could not believe his eyes.

“The conductor told me I either had to be kicked off the bus or pay afresh since the ticket I had was not genuine,” he says.

Hakiza insists he could not believe what he had heard from the conductor but there was nothing to do as he paid more money to enable him continue with the journey to attend the burial.

Starts Ugabus

He says that when he returned to Kampala, he enrolled for the Young African Leaders Initiative(YALI) in Nairobi, an initiative of the United States Department of State started  in 2010 by then President, Barack Obama.

Hakiza says that at YALI, his entrepreneurship skills were further sharped.

“On return to Uganda, I was fresh with the bad experience of the bus ticket scam which forced me to team up with a techie friend, Marvin Peter Akankwasa whom I had met at Makerere University. We launched a simple bus booking website but it failed,” he narrates.

According to Hakiza, they never gave up and six months later, they bounced back with a bus booking and ticketing mobile app, which he named Ugabus.

 According to their website, Ugabus brings together all bus transport operators across Uganda under a single window and consequently facilitating users to plan their bus travel across East Africa.

“UgaBus.com has a highly sophisticated system that enables users to do trip booking and seat reservation, providing a full itinerary experience for the first time in Ugandan bus booking,” the website says.

Hakiza says that by 2020, over 100,000 people had bought bus tickets using their online portal and that travelers to all East African countries had used the Ugabus app.

Growth

The online bus booking portal has since grown and earlier this month entered into an agreement with Toronto-based shared mobility company, Treepz for a takeover.

As Ugabus transitions to Treepz, Hakiza will now lead a 15-person team to oversee the Treepz foothold in Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi.

"We care alot about how people move from one city to another, and we did our best to build the most reliable bus booking app in Uganda. Now we are joining the Treepz family to accomplish a bigger vision-one that we think we can better achieve with Treepz. We have known and respected the exploits of the founding team led by Onyeka Akumah and today, we are very happy that we would be pioneering the business growth of Treepz in East Africa starting with Uganda,”Hakiza said.

Consequently, Ugabus will now be renamed as Treepz Uganda and will begin operations on December, 1, 2021 and will arguably become the region’s biggest online bus ticketing portal.