Many Belarusians have faced a situation where seats on a needed bus or minibus on pre‑weekend days are snapped up in the first minutes. However, people’s plans change, reservations are cancelled, and tickets return to the system. Now you won’t have to hunt for them manually, constantly refreshing the page – the major ticket‑booking service “Atlas” has introduced an automatic waiting‑list option.

Interestingly, the idea for developing this useful feature came from an ordinary schoolboy from Vileyka. His mother regularly faced the problem of no free seats on busy routes. To help her, the boy independently created a special bot. The program automatically monitored the site and instantly sent a notification as soon as someone cancelled their trip. Representatives of the booking service “Atlasbas” learned about this feature and decided to officially implement a similar option called “Catch a Ticket” in their system.

How does the new function work?

All the routine of searching for freed‑up seats is now fully automated for authorized users:

If all seats on the selected flight are already sold out, a button “Catch a Ticket” will appear in the interface.

Just one tap is enough for the screen to show a status that the passenger has been successfully added to the waiting list.

After that you can calmly go about your business. The system will continuously monitor the bus. As soon as a seat becomes free (someone cancelled their reservation or the carrier added an extra vehicle to the route), the service will instantly send a push notification to your smartphone.

It is important to remember: the notification itself does not automatically reserve the seat for you, so after receiving it you must promptly follow the link and purchase the ticket in the normal way.

Rules and limitations of the system

To ensure the service works correctly and protects users from excess spam, the developers have introduced several sensible rules:

Subscription limit: at any one time a passenger can track no more than three routes.

Notification frequency: if tickets for a route appear and disappear, the notification will be sent no more than once per hour.

Smartphone setup: to learn promptly about a freed‑up seat, you must in the personal‑cabinet settings of the app beforehand give consent to receive push notifications.

Route tracking stops automatically if you have already bought a ticket, the bus has departed from the station, or the route has been completely cancelled by the carrier.

Experts also remind users to stay safe: unofficial third‑party bots for finding locations may appear online. Their use is strongly discouraged, as scammers often employ such tools to steal personal and banking information under the guise of helping you find tickets. Stick to the official features of legitimate services only.