In an exclusive interview with WiT – his first since the announcements – Omio Group CFO Jean-Bernard Moens explains why a $10 million Asia-Pacific investment and the proposed acquisition of Rail Europe landed in the same week, and how they both lead to the same destination.
Two announcements, one company, seven days apart. First, a $10 million strategic investment from Granite-Integral to fund Omio’s push into Japan and South-east Asia. Then, an agreement to acquire Paris-headquartered Rail Europe – a deal that, on completion, would create a combined group selling more than 22 million rail tickets a year across 28,000 transport operators and travel sellers worldwide.
I asked if it was orchestrated. It wasn’t, said Moens. “It just happened that way.” The Granite-Integral raise had been a year in the making while Omio had approached Rail Europe only a few months earlier, with no certainty the two sides would even share a vision for the industry. They did. Both processes simply crossed the finish line at the same time.
“Double happiness,” he said, adding with a smile, “Double work as well.”
Taken apart, the two deals tell different stories – one about growing a new region, the other about consolidating an old one. Taken together, they describe a company trying to stop being known as only a European rail platform, albeit very good, and becoming a global ground transportation player, covering both B2B as well as three consumer brands eventually, when the Rail Europe deal is finalised.
The Japan and Asia opportunity
According to Moens, Omio’s European business is in strong shape – arguably the largest player on the continent, and certainly will be the largest once Rail Europe is folded in. But it couldn’t run away from one reality – most of the customers who love the brand only ever use it once.
“Those customers that come – whether they go to Europe maybe once every 10 years or once in their lifetime – it’s a little bit of a pity,” he said. “We create a great brand, they know us, but then they disappear forever.”
The fix, decided roughly two years ago, was to build inventory in the places those same travellers go next – which meant, inevitably, Japan.
“When you do a lot of rail services, you know that the best rail companies are in Japan,” he said. “The technology, the service, the timeliness, the cleanliness of the train – it’s gold standard.”
Omio already has East, Central and West Japan Railways on its platform, alongside Willer buses and some ferry inventory though he’s candid that ferries, in particular, are still “early days.”
The ambition isn’t to own the golden route between Tokyo and Osaka; it’s to pull travellers into the remote regions on either coast, which means courting smaller, harder-to-reach operators. That’s precisely where the Granite-Integral capital goes: “Every company that we embark on the platform, it’s an effort. That $10 million will go especially at accelerating that.”
Money, though, wasn’t really the constraint. “We could have funded the development from our own balance sheet,” Moens said. What Omio wanted from Granite-Integral, which describes itself as combining “Integral’s deep Japanese market expertise with Granite Asia’s extensive tech track record”, was introductions – a local network that could open doors with rail and bus operators who, he admits, had never heard of the company or may harbour a quiet anxiety about foreign platforms disrupting a notoriously precise service.
“We work a lot with them to explain that we are exactly the opposite,” he said. “We take the traveller by the hand.” That means building instructional videos and platform guidance for a ticketing system he concedes is “a little bit daunting for a foreigner”.
Jean-Bernard Moens: “Those customers that come – whether they go to Europe maybe once every 10 years or once in their lifetime – it’s a little bit of a pity. We create a great brand, they know us, but then they disappear forever.”
The traveller advantage: Winning without competing
The obvious challenge is that Japan rail is, in his words, “the golden ticket” – a market every travel platform wants but not many can crack, dominated by entrenched domestic operators. Moens’s answer is that Omio isn’t actually competing for what those operators care about most.
Local commuters make up roughly 95% of an operator’s traffic, he estimates; international travellers are a small, fragmented segment – Europeans, Americans, Australians, Koreans, Chinese – that most operators don’t have the time or the specialist knowledge to chase properly. “We do the reverse,” he said. “We are not interested in local travel, we are after that five percent. When they go to Japan, we are there. When they go to Europe, we are there.”
Because trains run on largely fixed costs, every incremental international passenger Omio delivers is closer to pure margin than new expense for the operator. “We are not trying to cannibalise or disintermediate their relationship with the Japanese customers. We are bringing new customers to them.”
It’s a pitch that also rides a broader generational shift Moens is seeing up closer – younger Europeans increasingly choosing multi-day, multi-train journeys over a direct flight for environmental reasons — Swedish friends of his, he notes, now travel from northern Europe to the south of France or Spain by train, a two-day journey across three to five connections, rather than take a four-hour flight.
Omio has also set its sights beyond Japan. Thailand is “really our next goal,” alongside an existing presence in Singapore and Malaysia and early-stage operations in Vietnam. Australia is in development; New Zealand is under consideration. He pointed to two tailwinds arriving together – heavy regional investment in transport infrastructure, and sustained Western appetite for travel to Asia.
What Rail Europe brings to the table
While the Granite-Integral deal is about planting flags, the Rail Europe acquisition is about buying something Omio has spent over a decade trying to build organically and, by his own admission, couldn’t fully replicate: distribution reach and a century of brand trust.
Rail Europe’s business, he says, is roughly 80% B2B – group bookings, national rail passes, and access for some 25,000 travel agents – against 20% consumer-facing sales. Omio is close to the inverse: a much larger, more global inventory, but built for direct-to-consumer booking.
“You can immediately see that there is a complementarity between the two,” he said. Rail Europe has no buses or ferries and, outside Europe, “they have nothing.” What it does have is a travel-agent network Omio doesn’t, and a brand with real cultural weight in specific pockets – American students, Australian travellers, Chinese partners.
“Omio the brand has been in existence for less than 10 years,” he said. “There’s no comparison. You need time to build a brand.”
He calls the proposed acquisition the missing distribution layer: once Rail Europe’s travel-agent network is plugged into Omio’s inventory, an agent who currently sells rail tickets in a limited set of European countries will be able to sell every Omio market – buses, ferries, and eventually Japan and Thailand too.
Asked directly about deal terms or valuation of the proposed deal, Moens declines. “Unfortunately, no.”
The B2B bet: “As a CFO, I love it”
As a CFO, Moens is unambiguous about where his enthusiasm sits. “I love B2B,” he said. “It’s a much more recurring business, where partners acquire the customers, they have the relationship with the customer – it’s slightly easier to predict and less prone to shocks in the system than the B2C side.”
He’s watching the same trend everyone else in travel is watching – Booking Holdings, Expedia Group and other major OTAs doubling down on B2B. In the ground transportation space, he said Omio stands out because he can’t see any of the giants wanting to build direct relationships with train operators themselves.
“It’s too costly for anyone to try to build what took us 14 years,” he said.
Omio already powers Uber’s rail and bus inventory in the background, a model he expects to see repeated rather than displaced by competitors building their own rail stack from scratch.
Post-acquisition, Omio plans to run three consumer-facing brands rather than consolidate into one: Omio as the ticketing platform, Rome2Rio as the discovery and route-planning layer – “like Google Maps, but on steroids” – and Rail Europe preserved for the audiences, particularly in the US and Australia, where its century-old name still carries weight.
The three are being engineered to feel seamless rather than separate: on routes where Omio and Rome2Rio inventory already overlap, a user can complete a booking without switching platforms, he said.
Ground transportation, in Omio’s current definition, means rail, bus and ferry – though Moens doesn’t rule out cars eventually entering the mix, name-checking Expedia’s acquisition of CarTrawler as evidence the category is heating up. “It’s getting interesting,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of interesting things happening in ground transportation now.”
Capital, AI, and the long game
Running two very different plays simultaneously – consolidating a mature European market while seeding an unproven one in Asia-Pacific – is, for a CFO, a resource allocation issue.
He believes the key is picking the right partners rather than just writing the largest cheque: Granite-Integral in Japan, and Temasek, a long-time Omio investor that helped the company establish its Singapore office.
“This is the third time that we do investment in Asia,” he said. “It’s not easier, not more complicated than Europe. It’s different. You need to learn.”
Beyond regional expansion, the next largest area of investment is artificial intelligence. Omio has a dedicated AI research hub in Singapore, currently seven to 10 people and growing, built around a bet that the next major shift in how people book travel won’t be mobile, but agentic. “We want to be the de facto partner for AI agents when it comes to ground transportation,” he said.
The way he sees it: if AI agents do end up disintermediating booking platforms the way some predict, controlling the underlying supply – the actual rail, bus and ferry inventory an agent needs to complete a booking – keeps Omio relevant regardless of who owns the interface.
“If you have the inventory, and from a technological point of view you are able to give the answer within one-fifth of a second, then you know you are in business,” he said. “To my knowledge, we are the only ones doing that at scale.”
Not everything will go agentic, at once though. Plenty of customers still buy tickets at a station kiosk or call a travel agent, and he doesn’t expect that to invert overnight. Besides, he believes, there’s also a practical argument for keeping a strong app layer alive well into the AI era: travellers in transit are frequently offline, anxious, and need something that works without a connection. “If you travel, we have your back,” he said. “It’s not just a contact center you can call – it’s an app that works even offline, even in the remotest areas.”
Despite his belief that Asia Pacific remains the fastest growing travel market for the forseeable future, Moens said headquarters will remain in Europe – partly for the simple time-zone convenience of bridging Asia and the Americas from the middle. What’s more likely down the line is regional autonomy rather than relocation: country or region managers empowered to build local inventory and value propositions, the way Omio already runs dedicated leads for Japan and Brazil. “If you’re not local there, it’s really hard to know how to do that.”
What people underestimate about Omio
Asked what people consistently get wrong about Omio’s strategy, Moens points to two things. First, scale: the global ground transportation ticketing market runs to roughly $300 billion a year, and Omio, even after 14 years, still holds only a small slice of it – while growing north of 25% year on year, a rate he calls one of the highest in the industry.
Second, and more structural, is where Omio sits in the traveller’s decision-making funnel. Booking.com and Expedia, he argues, win by capturing travellers who start with a destination and a hotel, then work downward to transport. Omio and Rome2Rio target the traveller who does the opposite – booking the train, bus or flight first, and figuring out what to do in destination details later. “It’s less expensive to capture them,” he said. “It’s a little bit more complicated – it’s not that easy to find your way and be relevant, but we have found a way. And then we bring them up into: why don’t you also book a hotel with us? Why don’t you also think about insurance?”
So what Omio wants to do is flip the travel funnel – and the $10 million investment as well as the proposed Rail Europe acquisition are but milestones on the road to becoming the best global transport technology company in the world. “We don’t want to be known as just good in Europe. Being global is strategically important,” said Moens.
