Travel Point A to B like a Boss with Faretrotter Live Search

In 2012, Justin Hill’s Faretrotter was just a dream on a European excursion. This week, after a year and a half of serious hustle, that vision finally came to fruition with the launch of their full-blown bonanza of travel technology – Faretrotter Live Search. We recently caught up with the globetrotting tech guru to find out how they’re giving globetrotters all the best transportation options with the click of a button.

So, if you’re a traveler tired of tackling transportation searches, settle in. The multi-modal travel app can help you get from point A to B whether taking ferries, trains, or airplanes (and that’s only naming a few). The Faretrotter Live Search lets you see up-to-minute transportation options – like a $38 Greyhound ride from Atlanta to NOLA versus a $269 Delta flight. In fact, bid adieu to three-letter airport codes or hours of Google searching altogether. With Faretrotter, all you need is a city, neighborhood or point of interest, and where you’d like to end up – easy peasy lemon squeezy – straight into that glass of Chiliguaro you’re downing on the sands of CostaRica because it’s that quick.
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“The first product we built was itinerary-based, so you say, ‘I’m here, I want to go there,’ and so you take MARTA to the airport and hop on a flight and then take a shuttle to the hotel,'” said CEO and Founder, Justin Hill. “It performed really well, but there was this whole paradigm shift in the multi-modal niche and so people were trying to come up with a new way of searching. There is a whole psychology around travel searching that has been working well, but people want to compare the best price, and so that itinerary base didn’t really fit. So, what we just launched feels like a travel agency, but we have the data of multi-modal.”

After spending some serious time reworking their approach to travel searching, it seems Faretrotter has found their happy place. While it took a pivot and serious sweat equity to get Faretrotter off to travel-search heaven, Hill’s story proves that sometimes the end result is worth the extra wait.

“We look up every mode of transportation between two points – so there are planes, trains, buses, Uber, Lyft, taxis, boats, ferries, shuttles, limousines, private drivers – basically any mode of transportation you could think of. There’s only one American startup that is a multi-modal competitor and maybe five others around the globe in Europe and Australia. They all launched in 2012, 2013, and 2014, but what they were doing was still being figured out. Their successes weren’t defined and neither were their failures. They may be further along in the process, but at this point, we can know what’s going to work and what’s not.”

Interested in exploring Faretrotter’s voyage choices? See the Live Search for yourself and take a little trip to paradise – it is spring break after all! And keep up with where they’re headed by following them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

[photo credit: Jason Seagle]
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