They arrived with glossy brochures, multilingual audio guides and the promise of transforming Goa into a world-class tourist destination. Today, those same double-decker buses sit abandoned in Baga — rusting monuments to yet another government tourism scheme that collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence. Goa’s Hop-On Hop-Off (HOHO) bus service is dead. When the Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC) first launched the service in May 2017 through Pune-based Prasanna Purple, it was hailed as a flexible, tourist-friendly sightseeing revolution — open-top and air-conditioned coaches gliding between Panjim, Miramar, Dona Paula, Old Goa and the Mangueshi Temple.
That operator exited. In February 2023, GTDC tried again. This time, Prive Tourism Private Limited from Gurgaon stepped in under a Public-Private Partnership, rolling out five modern buses — including two double-deckers — with GPS tracking, multilingual audio guides and expanded routes stretching all the way from Old Goa to Vagator. A golden-hour coastal service running from Miramar to Atal Setu was added for good measure. The fanfare was loud. The passengers, however, never came.
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By September-October 2025, it was over. A former company official, speaking to O Heraldo, made no attempt to dress up the failure. “We could not sustain due to low passenger turnout,” he said. “We had introduced international-style service but the HOHO concept was not accepted by the people.” Despite operating two route lines and initially recording what he described as promising numbers, the overhead costs — fuel, staffing, maintenance, fleet management — simply overwhelmed whatever revenue trickled in.
The Corporation’s own account of events makes for uncomfortable reading. Not only did the service fail to attract tourists — the private operator also stopped paying the committed annual revenue share of Rs 12 lakh to GTDC for two consecutive years. GTDC’s response? It forfeited the operator’s performance bank guarantee of Rs 15 lakh. Proceedings to recover the remaining dues are, in the Corporation’s words, “underway” — a phrase that, in Goa’s bureaucratic vocabulary, can mean almost anything.
The irony is that GTDC launched this service once, watched it fail. And then — with no serious study of why the first attempt collapsed, no honest assessment of whether Goa’s tourist profile was suited to this model, and no plan for what would happen if the numbers did not materialise — launched it again. With the same result.
Goa’s tourists, it turns out, do not want to hop on and off scheduled buses on fixed circuits. They want rental bikes, they want to stop at a shack when the mood strikes, not when a timetable tells them to.
