SkyBus 4+

Needs to do better

Bought tickets on website. Download app and register - no tickets show. To get tickets in the app, you need to buy in the app. It’s 2023 and no Apple Wallet integration. Bare minimum feature for a ticketed service. Apple Pay would be useful to pay with. Feels like the dev team haven’t been given enough time or budget to care about making the basics smoother for regular customers.

Also - no refunds no matter what. Change of plans even weeks from flying? No refund for you. About time Melbourne ditched SkyBus for a publicly run service that uses Myki or contactless upon boarding to stop rewarding this company.

Needs Apple Pay, Wallet, and keychain support

Functional and arguably better than just using the SkyBus website, however missing some important features that would make it much more useable:

Most important - ability to use iOS keychain that already stores all the credit card data securely. Instead, this app presents a non-standard keyboard that has a redundant option of using a camera to scan a credit card (only really useful if this is the first time you are going to use your brand new credit card), or the user can enter a credit card from scratch. There is no option to just auto fill credit cards from keychain like every other iOS app. Additionally, the app offers to store your credit card details “securely” in their cloud if you sign up for account. This is of course less than ideal, and ability to auto fill credit card details from iOS keychain is both more convenient and more secure.

Ability to use Apple Pay would make this even more convenient.

And last, the Wallet integration. The amount of time it takes to unlock the phone, start this app, get some sort of network connection, then fiddle with this app to bring up the skybus ticket is about to take people behind you in the bus queue a little annoyed. Bringing up the Wallet from the control centre even while the phone is locked is much faster.

All in all, a good app that does what it promises, but needs some improvements.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback, Apple Pay development is underway and will be available soon. In the meantime you can select to store your payment method so you will not need to re-enter your card details upon each purchase. An app account is required in order to be able to store your card details.

Can be improved

Not a bad setup, but a few amendments are requested:

- The Velocity Frequent Flyer option should be added after the quantity of tickets to be purchased is filled out.
- After the purchase of a ticket on the app, an email notification should be sent directly to the customer’s email address to confirm ticket purchase detailing the important information pertaining to said purchase. At the moment, it only notifies you that an email account has been created.
- Other than screenshots of the actual ticket at the time of purchase, what about offline access to the ticket wallet which displays the ticket purchase is advisable? Ticket wallet is embedded in the app (as opposed to the mobile wallet function), and requires mobile data to access and open the actual wallet.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback, we will take this on board for future development.
An email is not generated at time of purchase as the tickets are immediately available in the SkyBus app ticket wallet, including the tax invoice. The ticket wallet does not require mobile data to open or access tickets, it works completely offline.
we hope you continue to enjoy using the SkyBus app.