Wanderu Makes It Much Easier to Book Bus Trips

The Launchpad is a series that introduces Mashable readers to compelling startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Wanderu

One-Liner Pitch: Wanderu makes it easy to book travel via buses and trains.

Why It's Taking Off: It's the first time consumers are able to route and book a trip that spans multiple bus carriers in one place.

Wanderu, a mobile-friendly web app for finding bus and train routes in the U.S., won the grand prize for Innovative Web Technologies at SXSW this year, an award that's previously been garnered by the likes of Siri.

The Boston-based company is currently a member of PayPal's startup incubator, and is still in beta. Co-founder and CEO Polina Raygorodskaya says her team of three prepped the app for a launch at SXSW and have 12,000 users signed up, and will continue to add people to the beta each week with the public launch planned for early summer.

The complex technology behind Wanderu, which has been in development since 2011, reveals why the startup was such a hit at SXSW. To consumers, Wanderu offers a friendly interface to find the best route to a destination, but it's not merely doing for ground transportation what Hipmunk did for air travel. The necessary technology is much deeper. Air travel sites can plug in to an intermediary such as ITA to gather data. No intermediary like this existed to gather information from various bus and train vendors, so Wanderu made one.

"We are the first company to have direct partnerships with our ground travel providers

"We are the first company to have direct partnerships with our ground travel providers so this gives us access to get accurate data," says Raygorodskaya. There were no standardized codes for bus stops as there are for airports, so Wanderu created codes. The partnerships allow Wanderu to link directly to the checkout page on a bus vendor's website rather than just dropping a person on the homepage, as earlier competitors had done.

"Often times the search would break because when you're scraping somebody's site, any changes to their site will break your site, and there's often changes with these companies," Raygorodskaya says.

Even though the back end and user-facing app could be run as two different businesses, at the moment Wanderu is not offering licensing of the data.

Wanderu will route a trip point-to-point, so it includes walking directions to the bus stop that you might need. It can also loop together multiple bus lines — there are more than 170 bus companies in the U.S., Raygorodskaya says — and includes Amtrak along with its bus provider partners.

Like many entrepreneurs, Raygorodskaya has personal experience with the pain point her company addresses. She frequently traveled by bus between New York and Boston for her first company, a boutique fashion PR firm. Accessing bus vendor websites was difficult or impossible on mobile, and she'd have to search several different sites to find one with last-minute tickets available and with a schedule that worked.

But the idea for a company didn't come about until Raygorodskaya and co-founder Igor Bratnikov were on a cross-country road trip to raise awareness for national parks and a ride share cancelled on her group, leaving them stranded at a remote national park in Virginia. Having to rent a car to continue the trip felt like failure because the trip was planned to rely fully on ride-shares.

This problem — how to get from two domestic destinations at a reasonable price, and last-minute — is addressed with Wanderu's app. The team, keeping in both entrepreneurial spirit and faith in their product, actually traveled from Boston to SXSW via bus, the route planned with their own app.

The likely user base of Wanderu will be digitally-savvy 20somethings who are accustomed to finding answers to everything via a smartphone — which also happens to be the same age demographic that frequents the more affordable ground transportation.

Some benefits of bus travel are first, the ability to talk on the phone during the ride, but also the fact that ground travel drops you off at the center of a city, so no need to take a taxi downtown like you do from an airport. There's also no hefty security check in process, so you can arrive just minutes early.

"You can plug in on your computer, get work done, watch a movie, go on Facebook, talk to your friends, and those hours fly by much quicker

"You can plug in on your computer, get work done, watch a movie, go on Facebook, talk to your friends, and those hours fly by much quicker than they would going to the airport and flying," Raygorodskaya says.

Wanderu has a few big industry names involved as investors or advisors, including Jeff Clarke, chairman of Orbitz and Greg Lynch, former CEO of Greyhound.

While Raygorodskaya left her first company and Bratnikov turned down offers from law firms right as he was finishing law school, to start Wanderu, a major win for the team was bringing in technologist Eddy Wong as co-founder, who they met through a friend. Wong previously was chief architect at Open Sesame, which was acquired in 2000 by Allaire which was then purchased by Macromedia.

"We told him what we wanted to build and he said this is a very interesting challenge, an interesting problem" she explains. "It's pretty complicated to build. He got excited about that."

Image courtesy of Flickr, geezaweezer