Compare Global Transit Fares with Faretrotter

Meet Justin Hill, he is the Founder of Faretrotter and part of our Travel Massive Atlanta chapter. Faretrotter searches and compares every mode of transportation between two points to help make travel easier.

Faretrotter is for travelers who need help discovering, searching, and comparing multiple route options between two locations.  Some customers use Faretrotter when travelling to unfamiliar places to discover which route to take to their destination.  Others, who make frequent and familiar trips, find Faretrotter most useful to compare fares, schedules, and availability for many different routes.

What inspired you to create this startup? 

The idea came after a trip from Boulder, Colorado, to Brussels, to Hamburg, and back. While searching and planning the trip, I visited dozens of websites to learn how to navigate between cities.  Most were either in French or German and half were in the Euro and half in USD.  I took seven different modes of transportation on this single trip. It was a grueling task to plan my itinerary when all I wanted to do was get to my destination for as cheap as possible. This was the “ah – ha!” moment, when I realized this was something a computer could (and probably should) do.

How did you build your startup?

We spent the first year and a half in stealth mode before we launched.  We used this time observing the successes and failures of our competition, perfecting our product fit, forming partnerships, customer discovery, and several iterations of our core product.  

Photo Credit: jasonseagle.com

How is your startup disrupting the travel scene today? 

We are changing how travel data is contextualized and the psychology of how travellers actually plan and make decisions for their trips. Compared to our indirect competition – we are focused on providing every possible mode and option between two points.  This is something that the incumbents and traditional online travel agents – like Expedia and Priceline – have yet address, but something our customers really value.  The second way is focusing on real time fares, schedules, and availability – which our direct competition is having a difficult time with.

How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

The industry has been wanting to move into multimodal, but nobody has really figured it out yet.  If you ask “why do we search travel the way we do today” and get down to the details – the answer partially lies in deregulation, at least from an industry perspective.  Since airline deregulation – we have seen how global distribution systems (GDS) impact distribution and content for the airlines.  As for the other modes of transportation, they are not properly addressed by GDS’s and are all over the board – you have some new, some old, and still some government sponsored transportation options.  

Multimodal solutions address these issues by aggregating and translating travel data in a way that just makes life easier for travelers.  We save them time on the searching side.  And just as important, we save them both time and money on the traveling side.  Only multimodal solutions can provide this level of impact.

Photo Credit: jasonseagle.com

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

Yes.  Talk to and understand your customers, create something of value for them, and you will do just fine.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Justin Hill and Faretrotter on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter.