Delhi to Manali, Himachal Pradesh

Both of us have traveled to many destinations in India and abroad together. But Sundeep has a weird problem. He can’t sleep in public transport, be it by bus, train, or plane. Whenever we are on a trip to some destination that involves a night bus journey, the whole bus/train compartment sleeps while Sundeep is wide awake. He has little choice but tries to pass the night by watching movies on his phone. But the phone network is not consistently robust throughout the journey. Because of choppy connectivity, the movies stream smoothly in some parts and totally disappear in other parts. As a solution, he tried to pre-download movies on his phone before the trip. That idea flopped since these movies ended up hogging a lot of phone memory. He was left with little space to click pictures and videos during the trip. The good news is we found a solution to this tricky situation during our recent trip to Manali in Himachal Pradesh.  GoldSeat – a of its kind, licensed on-the-go offline entertainment app for travel services saved the day or to be accurate – the night.

Goldseat is a premium experience across Air, Bus, and Railway Networks in India. We experienced this cool app enroute Manali. Apparently, there was a Goldseat device in our bus (Himalayan Nomads, KTC) which was switched on before we started from Delhi. We downloaded the app on our phones and once the device was on, it showed up in our Wi-Fi options on the phone. The password for the app was mentioned on stickers pasted on the windows. As soon as we typed the password, we were presented with a plethora of movies and TV shows on the GoldSeat app in our phones.

We scrolled and scrolled to check out the available options. There was too much to choose from. We watched Masaan which is one of our all-time favourite movies. The movie played as smoothly as it does on a PC or TV screen that is not connected to the internet. No lag time, no buffering, just pure entertainment. Since it was already dark outside and we were yet to hit the mountains, there was no scenery to enjoy. Because of GoldSeat app time almost flew.  Next, we watched some Film Companion interviews after the movie.

The journey to Manali from Delhi is almost 14 hours and we were concerned as to how we were going to pass that time. The bus was very comfortable with potent AC and enough leg space and the movies played through GoldSeat app enhanced the experience. We were so impressed with the app that we went ahead and booked our return tickets from Manali to Delhi in a similar bus that was equipped with GoldSeat – the offline in-bus entertainment app. We will try to make GoldSeat our travel companion in our future trips as well.