How do people planning
a trip from A to B using ground transportation plan their journeys? It is a
question that has been front of mind for tech platforms in the sector as they grow.
Should they move into new geographical markets, acquire rivals or expand their
offering beyond their core business? Or perhaps all three?
The sector has been
especially busy in the past few years. French car-pooling
platform BlaBlaCar is one active player.
Founded in 2006, the company has since raised $565 million
to fund its growth. Long-distance carpooling is still the core of what
BlaBlaCar does, said CEO and co-founder Nicolas Brusson. The last decade has been
focused on international expansion.
“It was a mix of launching countries
organically like Brazil, India and Spain, but we were also being acquisitive in
Germany, Mexico, Ukraine and Poland,” Brusson told Phocuswire. “In C2C
marketplaces, you tend to have a winner-takes-all phenomenon, a bit like
Craigslist in the classifieds sector where you tend to have one player that
really captures the liquidity in the market, hence the obsession with go fast
and expand.”
We were really good at building a brand that people recognize and thought it was silly to limit what we do to just carpooling...
Nicolas Brusson, BlaBlaCar
Brusson says the strategy started to
evolve between 2018 and 2019.
“We were really good at building a brand
that people recognize and thought it was silly to limit what we do to just
carpooling, and maybe we should offer the entire spectrum of ground transport
for two reasons: one, to expand the business, but also because as you become
more mainstream with other means of transport, you actually help carpooling.
People might come to book a train or a bus and that find a carpool is more
convenient.”
BlaBlaCar then started acquiring bus
distribution platforms and expanded to Brazil, India and Turkey with their long-distance
coach markets.
Brusson said, “They are very fragmented
and very unsophisticated on distribution. You have hundreds of operators and
between two and six companies competing on the same route. Those companies tend
to be second or third generation family-run businesses [and] not very sophisticated
on anything digital, so online distribution is pretty poor. You have a bit of
this disconnect in this market where you have a very young, online-first
audience who have to buy tickets by coming into a bus station like in the
1970s.”
Brusson said next steps for BlaBlaCar include adding planes and potentially ferries.
“We even imagine expanding into the
world of accommodation to some extent. We are not there yet,” said Brusson.
Rome2Rio
Door-to-door trip
planning platform Rome2Rio was founded in 2010. The company has since raised
almost half a billion dollars in investment and operates in roughly 160 countries. In 2019, it was acquired by Berlin-based travel booking company
Omio.
Wendy Olson Killion, CEO of Rome2Rio,
said, “We're focusing on how to help travelers solve the A-to-B problem, but
there's a natural opportunity, how they discover a destination, which opens up
adjacent spaces like activities and experiences. You'll hear more from us in
this space.”
Rome2Rio says 45% of searches on the
platform are covered by multimodal options. Olson Killion added that 70% of customers
searching for European travel viewed train-only options, 20% viewed bus-only
options and 9% looked at flights only. Searches for rail and bus travel are
growing by 20% year over year.
Travelier
Travelier (formerly Bookaway), founded in
2016, is another fast-growing company in the sector. It has raised $80
million and since 2021 has acquired South East Asia's 12Go, Argentina's ground transportation online platform Plataforma 10 and Brazil’s DeÔnibus.
CEO Noam Toister said, “Latin American
countries represent a blue ocean in the sense that they are huge bus markets
with very low online sales share. Buses are the most popular form of travel for
domestic travelers in LATAM, yet it's decades behind flights in online
penetration.”
He added, “Our organic growth in the past
year has been phenomenal, driven by coverage (Travelier is still growing at an
average pace of eight new operators every day), product improvements and
offline to online tailwinds. We are always on the lookout for other potential
opportunities in markets we don't serve yet. In terms of ground transportation
sectors, we already are multimodal and sell a decent amount of buses, rail,
ferry and private transfers.”
Flix
Flix, which was
founded in 2013, began its journey in Germany. Since then, it has undergone
rapid international expansion into markets such as Spain, the U.K., the U.S., Canada,
Poland and Turkey.
It has launched its
own services in many countries as well as acquiring rivals, including Megabus, Postbus,
Swebus and the iconic Greyhound in 2021. In January this year, the company
acquired airport-transfer company Flibco. It now operates in 40 countries on four
continents.
A Flix spokesperson
told Phocuswire, “Flix’s growth strategy is based on an
asset-light, technology-driven platform model that enables scalable and
profitable organic growth, complemented by selective acquisitions that are a
natural strategic fit. Flix's core business remains its
high-performance FlixBus and FlixTrain offer—nevertheless, we will
also identify market potential beyond this and leverage opportunities
for sustainable growth.”
Flix said that in 2024,
the company connected more than 6,800 destinations globally and that 31% of
these destinations had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.
Fragmentation,
regulations
All four platforms have benefited from
fragmentation in the ground transportation sector.
BlaBlaCar’s Brusson said, “My view and
what we see is that there is more and more fragmentation on the operators and
more and more value moving to the distribution layer, which is mechanical, like
the more fragmented the supply, the more value is being shifted toward, like a
marketplace or a distribution layer.”
Rome2Rio’s Olson Killion added, “The carriers
don't have to consolidate, but the information can come together so people can
choose the journey that works best for them. We're prioritizing using
technology to build trust without losing the human element that is so
important. We have experts on the ground that are collecting modes, schedules
and more that aren't online. They're digitizing non-digital content.”
The Flix spokesperson called the mobility market “highly fragmented and
competitive.”
“Each mode of transport plays a vital role, contributing to a broader
patchwork that together meets the diverse needs of travelers. More
broadly, consolidation can occur where regulatory frameworks allow it, while
policy conditions and market access rules remain key factors
influencing how the sector evolves.”
New regulations
covering the online multimodal ticketing market in Europe may also help the platforms.
In a world of agentic AI, brand doesn't disappear, it moves upstream.
Wendy Olson Killion, Rome2Rio
A Eurobarometer survey released by the European Commission in 2025
found that 36% of people struggle to book tickets that combine different
transport modes, and 31% of respondents did not book such journeys due to the
complexity of the booking process. As a result, the European Commission will announce
new regulations in the second quarter of 2026 to create “a more integrated,
transparent and user-friendly digital booking system”
AI impact
But what about the
threat of artificial intelligence (AI) potentially making these expensively
built multinational brands obsolete?
Rome2Rio’s Olson Killion said, “In a world of
agentic AI, brand doesn't disappear, it moves upstream. AI agents don't choose
based on marketing, they choose on trust, accuracy and consistency. Rome2Rio's
role is to be an authoritative source of truth for multimodal travel because
our answers are reliably correct in the real world. As AI agents increasingly
sit between travelers and supply, the competitive advantage shifts from who has
the most data to who has the most trusted data.”
BlaBlaCar’s Brusson said, “Where it
becomes interesting is specifically for the long tail. If you think of a very
frequent traveler going from Brussels to London, they go to Eurostar, not to
ChatGPT. We totally believe that the intent is going to shift to LLM and, as
usual, it's going to create a shift in terms of players. The fact that we have
captured supply, with carpooling, but we're also playing in this open B2C
world, we see that there's a massive opportunity to go and capture this
long-tail demand.”
Travelier’s Toister said, “Ground
transportation is probably the travel sector that is most resilient to AI disintermediation.
The reason is that the data layer of ground transportation is not commoditized
like flights and hotels (tours and experiences might be in a similar position).
Local operators are still mostly analog, and in order to digitize the industry,
Travelier also provides inventory management systems for ground and sea
transportation operators globally.”
Targeting the true traveler journey
One thing these
companies may not have considered is that most travelers are not looking to
travel from a specific A to a specific B.
In a recent LinkedIn post, strategic transport and sustainability
advisor Arie Bleijenberg argued that people choose their A and B according to
their transport options.
“They cycle to the
local supermarket, take the tram to the city center and drive to the
out-of-town shopping centre” he wrote.
Bleijenberg also
pointed out that despite better transport links and faster speeds, the average
travel time people take each day has remained largely unchanged. In the U.K.,
he said the average time spent traveling was virtually unchanged between 1972
and 2019, despite improvements in vehicles and faster transport options.
Travelers will go
further as transportation improves, meaning that the platforms could almost sit
back and enjoy the growth as connections and transport speeds increase.
But given their track
records, it seems unlikely that BlaBlaCar, Rome2Rio, Travelier and Flix are
going to sit stationary in traffic.