Back the day I had a short stint at a bus charter business. There we also tried to reduce costs by bundling travel group's individual itenaries and match that against available busses to reduce empty rides. The result would have been that groups might have different busses on different days. Nice idea, in theory.
Turned out that avoiding empty trips in transportation is hugely dependant on volume by time and region. It is also a very hard problem to solve as you need to match availability data from busses (which needs to be collected in a scaleable way), trips (which need to be in the correct regions and times) and then simply come up with an optimization algorithm to sort it all out. Peace of cake... Not. Especially if you want to link that to your pricing already during customer booking instead of after-the-fact discounts.
One might suspect that the transportation industry which has the volumes and the cost pain of empty trips might already have solved it if it woupd have been that easy.
Turned out that avoiding empty trips in transportation is hugely dependant on volume by time and region. It is also a very hard problem to solve as you need to match availability data from busses (which needs to be collected in a scaleable way), trips (which need to be in the correct regions and times) and then simply come up with an optimization algorithm to sort it all out. Peace of cake... Not. Especially if you want to link that to your pricing already during customer booking instead of after-the-fact discounts.
One might suspect that the transportation industry which has the volumes and the cost pain of empty trips might already have solved it if it woupd have been that easy.