This document discusses the founder and CEO of GoPili, Yann Raoul, and his vision for bringing order to transportation. Recent years have seen the rise of the sharing economy and on-demand services like Uber and Airbnb that have disrupted traditional transportation models. GoPili aims to serve as a meta search engine that connects travelers to transportation options for local, inter-city, and long-distance trips across multiple carriers and OTAs to simplify trip planning and bring order to a complex market.
Hello everyone, My name is Yann Raoul, I am the CEO of KelBillet / Gopili and today I am pleased to talk about our Travel sector, and especially about the new order.
The Travel Market looked like this : peaceful and well established,
…. with clear frontiers between the main verticals. Hotels, Flights, Trains, Packages.
Until the Unicorn-liked « Trouble makers » came !
The on-demane economy
The sharing economy
And great companies like AirBnb, UBER, BlaBlaCar, CaptainTrain, CityMapper,…
Fragmented market and frontiers are blurred
So let’s put some order !
The New Order is defined by 2 main components : on one side, distance, and on the other side, the business approach
First, Operators, Carriers. The newer players in this field are in bus companies, thanks to the deregulation laws.
Then, platforms, like BlaBlaCar and Uber.
Then, OTA , which are mostly focused on long distance trips …
Like meta does.
If we isolate the area in the middle
One interesting thing is that there is a gap between long and short journeys, for the meta segment.
You see what I mean ? Here we are, with Gopili.
So why have we chosen this market ? Why is this intercity market so interesting ? What are the opportunities ?
Let’s define it more accurately : targetted journeys are from 50 to 500 miles , that means mostly domestic or cross-border journeys. The median distance is 250miles ….
…and mainly performed by Ground Transportation :2 hours in high speed train, 4 hours by car , 5 hours by bus. Flight is just a challenger for longer distance journeys. This area was held by national train companies, but new fragmentation started 3 years ago : development of bus companies in Europe and ridesharing.
On a user point of view, Intercity journeys are mostly used to visit friends and relatives. Their need is to move from their home city A to a city B and their main questions are : how can i go there ? What are the modes of transport ? What is the best price ?
What about business opportunities ?
For local transportation, the business is mostly public subsidised – so quite hard for business. The mid & long haul Business is already mature on both Meta & OTA, even if there are still opportunities.
Intercity business is now in openaccess in most countries in Europe and there are new big players like Flixbus, Ouibus and BlaBlaCar. In 3 years in France and Germany, Bus passengers volume has jumped from few thousands per year to more than 10 millions !
Of course, the basket value for ground transportation is much lower than flights (for example 40 euros for bus, 80 euros for train)…
But the volume of journeys is much higher, so at the end….
At the end, the business volume is more than half the flights business volume !
And here is Gopili, our Leading metasearch engine.
Our mission is to help travellers to find the right option for their journey. We developed the first multimodal search engine which compares the 4 modes of transportation : train, bus, flights, and even ridesharing !
About the product, we worked hand-to-hand with more than100 travellers, to build together the most useful user interface, through workshops. On a data point of view, we had to create a completely new stack and formats which enables the integration of all kind of routes and stations (there is no IATA codes for train or bus stations, or only few of them).
So we created partnership with more than 50 partners which represent more than 500 transport companies. All are referenced on Gopili.
And users love it We reached now more than 3.5 millions visits per month - and our company is already profitable.
Some results : last year, we generated 40 millions euros of sales for our partners. This year, our forecast is to reach 100 million euros.
We are now present in 5 countries under our 2 brands, Gopili and KelBillet.
And now, here is the vertical segment called Ground Transportation !