I don't travel by bus often, but when I do I always have to look for a counter from which to buy a ticket or a day pass, and not a few times I was put in the situation of walking or travel without a ticket because I couldn't find a RATB kiosk from which to buy a ticket or a subscription. Not having a card with which to pay for trips, because I don't travel daily, I wondered why the RATB does not introduce a method of paying by SMS for trips made by bus. Well, it seems that RATB has been working on this system for some time and recently officially launched it, allowing travelers to purchase one-day passes through a simple SMS sent to a short phone number.
Basically, you get on the bus, take your phone in your hand, send an SMS with the letter A to the number 7456 (from Orange, Vodafone or Cosmote) and on the terminal you will receive a unique code that you present to the controller when you get on the bus and he will ask for ticket. You can only buy one-day subscriptions through this method and for them you pay €1.75 + VAT, that is about €2.20, 9.60 lei per Romanian. With these 9.60 lei and that control code from your phone, you can travel on any RATB bus from Bucharest ( I make an exception the express and preorasenis lines) until the end of the day you made the purchase and if you happen to travel with several people, then you can buy a subscription like this for each of them separately, but you must be careful not to split up because that code must be presented at the control.
My opinion is that the RATB is being modernized little by little and this payment method is excellent for those who are either in a hurry and don't have time to buy a ticket/subscription, or don't have money with them. If you are a subscriber of a mobile operator, then the money paid is invoiced through the telephone subscription and you pay it at the end of the month together with that invoice. If you are on the card, the money for the one-day subscription is taken from the available credit (you must have more than €2.20 on the respective card). You can find more details about the new RATB subscription on this page si on this page. What's next? Probably NFC payments using mobile terminals.
