Shawy Takes Its Oman Bus-Booking App to Riyadh and Sharjah

Shawy, a Muscat-based startup that sells intercity bus tickets online, has added cross-border trips. In a press release dated 19 October 2026, the company says its platform now covers more than 100 routes, including trips from Oman to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The startup only launched in March 2026, so this is a quick expansion. Its scale has not been independently verified yet.

📌 Key Takeaways

• What changed: Shawy says travellers can now book seats online from Oman to Riyadh and Makkah in Saudi Arabia, and to Fujairah, Al Ain and Sharjah in the UAE, as well as on domestic routes. That claim comes from the company's 19 October announcement.
• What we could check: On 21 October, the Shawy explore page listed Muscat to Riyadh, Riyadh to Muscat, Muscat to Sharjah and Sharjah to Muscat. Makkah, Fujairah and Al Ain were not on that page when we looked.
• Who runs it: The co-founders are Mohammed Al-Badaai (CEO) and Amirhossein Nozarian (COO). The company says the platform brings together operators including Mwasalat and Eternity Road Land Transport.
• Data residency: The company says its data is hosted inside Oman. It also offers apps on iOS and Android, a website, and five interface languages.
• What is missing: Shawy has not published booking volumes, user numbers, revenue or funding.

🛣️ What Shawy Announced

The release, datelined Muscat, calls Shawy Oman's first online intercity bus booking marketplace. It says the platform has grown past 100 routes. The five new destinations it names are:

• Saudi Arabia: Riyadh and Makkah
• United Arab Emirates: Fujairah, Al Ain and Sharjah

The release says passengers can search, book and pay for tickets through the iOS and Android apps or the website. It lists five languages: Arabic, English, Persian, Hindi and Urdu. It also says the platform "supports local payment options" and that "its data is hosted inside Oman."

The Shawy website names three payment partners: Thawani, AmwalPay and QPay, with QPay offering buy-now-pay-later instalments. The site also says its transport partners hold licences regulated by Oman's Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology (MTCIT). The website lists Mwasalat, Big Bus and Eternity Road Transport as operators. The release names Mwasalat and Eternity Road Land Transport.

In the same release, co-founder and COO Amirhossein Nozarian said: "Our goal is to build infrastructure, not just an app." He added that the company wants "to be ready to connect more destinations" as Gulf integration moves forward. The release links this to the planned unified GCC tourist visa.

🔍 Checking the Claims

This is a self-published announcement. When we checked, we found no independent news coverage of it, so we tested the claims against the live product.

To be fair to Shawy, featured-route pages rarely show a full network, so the missing destinations do not mean the release is wrong. Still, readers should treat the 100-route figure and the full list of destinations as company claims until the company publishes more data or other outlets confirm them.

💡 Why a Bus App Counts as Tech News

Online intercity bus booking is a classic marketplace problem. Operators each run their own timetables and pricing, and many passengers still buy tickets at a counter. A platform like Shawy has to combine operator inventory, handle seat booking, take local digital payments and issue e-tickets. The company's website lists e-tickets with QR boarding passes and live bus tracking in the app.

Cross-border routes make all of this harder. Fares, schedules and border paperwork differ from country to country, and every new operator has to be connected to the system. Whether a small Muscat team can keep that working smoothly across three countries is what this expansion will really test.

Shawy is one of a growing number of young Omani companies building digital services for everyday use. Ministry data showed the number of AI companies in the country nearly doubling from 22 to 42 in a year. Shawy is a consumer marketplace, not an AI company, but it comes from the same wave of local software startups that Oman's diversification plans depend on.

⚠️ Open Questions

• Traction: No booking, user or revenue figures have been published. On 21 October, the Oman App Store listing showed only a handful of ratings, so it tells us little about usage.
• Funding: The release mentions no investors or funding round.
• Operator depth: The release names two operators and the website names three. How many cross-border services are actually available to book is still unclear.
• Regulation across borders: The release does not say how refunds, passenger data and consumer protection work for trips that end in Saudi Arabia or the UAE.

🇴🇲 Why this matters for Oman

Cheap, easy-to-book land travel to Saudi Arabia and the UAE matters for workers, families and tourists who rely on buses. Many of them are the same multilingual communities Shawy targets with its Persian, Hindi and Urdu interfaces. If an Oman-built platform with Oman-hosted data can win cross-border bookings, it adds to the logistics and tourism goals in Vision 2040. It would also show that local software startups can sell beyond the Sultanate's borders. The next proof points are published booking numbers, more operators connected, and independent confirmation that the full route network is live. Until then, this is an early, promising expansion that has not yet been independently verified.