The problem
Booking a multi-leg ground trip in the US is a tax on anyone who doesn't fly everywhere. Say you're in Rockville, Maryland and you need to get to midtown Manhattan by 4pm. The trip is obvious in the abstract: drive to a Metro station, ride the Red Line to Union Station, catch an intercity bus to Newark, then NJ Transit into Penn Station. Four legs, three operators, one trip. In practice, planning it means opening five tabs. Google Maps for the drive and the Metro. FlixBus and OurBus and Vamoose for the intercity leg, because prices shift hour to hour and the cheapest one is never the same. NJ Transit's site for the Newark leg. Then back to Maps to sanity-check the timing because the agent at FlixBus doesn't know when your Metro arrives, and the Metro doesn't know when your bus leaves, and nothing in this stack knows when you leave the house. You make a plan. You book a piece of it. Then something changes. Your car won't start. The Red Line is single-tracking. Your bus is 40 minutes late. The plan that took twenty minutes to assemble is now wrong, and there's no tool that can tell you whether you can still make the next leg, whether you should rebook, or what it costs you either way. Google Maps shows you the route but doesn't book. Rome2Rio compares the options but doesn't book. Hopper books your flight but doesn't touch ground transit. Wanderu and Omio book bus and rail but don't stitch in the rideshare or local transit legs, and none of them watch the trip after you've paid. The intercity operators each want you in their own app, with their own account, paying their own way. The result is that millions of people who could be taking a $50 four-leg trip instead spend $300 on a flight, or skip the trip entirely, because the planning surface is more expensive than the ticket. The technology to close this loop has existed for a decade. The partner deals to do it cleanly haven't, because the per-ticket margins are too thin for any travel company funded on flight commissions to care. That's the gap we wanted to close.
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