Wanderu, the US ground transport booking site, has expanded its coverage from beyond the East Coast to include the West Coast -- from British Columbia to San Diego and out to Las Vegas.
Today the bus-and-train booking site is launching its West Coach search with Boltbus, Megabus, and Lux Bus. It will integrate Tufesa shortly afterward. This brings its partnership total to more than 20 intercity bus companies.
Since its Northeast launch in August, Wanderu has facilitated more than 500,000 bus ticket purchases, says CEO Polina Raygorodskaya.
Raygorodskaya tells Tnooz:
This was a result of new partnership deals as well as growth and demand in our search to expand to the West Coast.
We have already had thousands of people searching for trips from Seattle, California and Oregon already in our search and the routes/schedules were not available until now.
Our own technology is also constantly growing and improving and we will be releasing a lot of new features over the next couple of weeks as well as an even more advanced version of our routing technology.
How does Wanderu plan to get the word out?
We are going to be doing a lot of on the ground promotions both with schools as well as with our partners doing giveaways.
We also do online marketing both SEO and SEM and generate a lot of content and guides to help people travel by bus, identify where stations are and get inspiration for their trips.
We are headed back to SXSW again next week and will have a live monkey with us back again this time for 3 days. We will be heading back from Austin to Boston by bus and doing giveaways along the way.
Wanderu now has 16 full-time employees. In August, Wanderu closed a $2.45 million venture round.