Cuthbert, who has been an advisor to the site which describes itself as a “completely new travel search experience”, has relocated from San Francisco to Melbourne, where Rome2Rio is based.
He told WIT, “Our API is in test with a number of partners already, and we’ll deliver the first version of our white-label solution in the next few weeks.
“Interest is pretty high already, and my guess is that when these initial partners launch we’ll see a lot more potential partners raise their hands. At a certain level of penetration — we’re not sure how deep into the market that is — multi-modal will become a “must have” for OTA’s worldwide, and we would hope to be the supplier of choice.”
Investors in the first round are the Melbourne entrepreneurs Guy King & Bevan Clark — founders and former owners of RetailMeNot, which was acquired recently by Whaleshark — and an unnamed Online Travel Agency based in Asia.
Funds from the raising will go towards new hires in the engineering team, and a concentrated effort on the business development front.
Cuthbert said the company is looking forward to building a substantial B2B presence in the online travel space: “There’s a good vibe about Rome2Rio within the industry, and a growing view that consumers will soon demand multi-modal search results, particularly for travel in Europe and other markets where air travel is often not the best option.
“Those two things combine to provide an opening for Rome2Rio to deliver tools that allow any site to incorporate multi-modal search results, at little or no cost, into their own offerings.”
Asked why he was back in the game – “wouldn’t you rather be spending time with your grand-daughter?” – Cuthbert, who founded Viator, said, “My four-year-old granddaughter is a real sweetie, easy to look after, and now she’s at pre-school I still have plenty of time on my hands. So time is not an issue. But if it hadn’t been such an interesting opportunity I probably wouldn’t have jumped backed in to an “almost” full-time role.”
He said Rome2Rio was interesting because it is at the leading edge of a change that will eventually impact everyone who sells travel: the transition from air-only search results to multi-modal (ie air + train + bus + ferry + car) results.
“You don’t have to have traveled very much to know that in certain geographies — Europe is the best example — surface transport often makes much more sense than air travel, and that this is a change that had to happen eventually.”
Comparing it with Viator, he said, a key difference with Rome2Rio is that the technology is a crucial factor. “At Viator, it was the business model and the partnerships we built, while Rome2Rio is interesting because of the super-fast search results across a vast database of operators. That’s something others who have come into this space have run into trouble with, and something we’ll be focused on continually improving.”
Cuthbert also beiieves that in travel, “there has been too much technology-driven innovation, rather than innovation that’s focused on real problems”.
“It’s common to see startups whose stated reason for being is something like “My partner and I were planning our vacation and we had lots of trouble doing [insert some imagined problem here] and we knew we could use [collaborative filtering and a proprietary algorithm and social media and who knows what else] to fix that.” Really?
“In my experience, many of those startups were looking for a problem to solve, rather than genuinely responding to a real shortcoming in the marketplace.”
Asked what needs to happen within organisations for an innovation culture to take hold, Cuthbert said it’s all about the people, starting at the top, and the type of culture that prevails.
“Some cultures value innovation, while others try to graft it on when their market share starts to slip. That’s tough.”
