Today we’d like to introduce you to Polina Raygorodskaya.
Polina, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Prior to starting Wanderu, I was running my own boutique public relations firm that catered to clients in the fashion and lifestyle sector. I had started the company while attending Babson College, which is consistently ranked as the #1 school for entrepreneurship.
Using the connections I had made as an editorial and runway model in New York, I was able to procure clients, so my PR and event production business soon took off. At the time, I was still living with my parents in Newton, but I soon realized that if I was going to be serious about my business, I had to be in NYC full time because that’s where the fashion scene is.
While I was living in New York and running my first company, I often had to travel for work to D.C. and Philadelphia, or to Boston to visit my family and attend classes at Babson. Taking the bus was always my preferred way to travel because it was very cheap and, as buses have free WiFi and power outlets, I could use the time to be productive and get some work done, instead of having to spend tons of money not just on flights but also on taxis to get me to the distant NYC airports.
The main problem with that, though, was that I had to visit every carrier’s website and manually compare options to find the one that best fit my schedule and budget. That’s when I realized I shouldn’t have to do all that every time I needed to go somewhere, and it was back then that I became aware of the potential business opportunity. The turning point came in the summer of 2011 when my now-business partner Igor Bratnikov and I joined a group of young professionals traveling across the country using only shared rides on a mission to raise awareness about national parks and forests.
During our trip, a driver who was supposed to take us to our next destination canceled on us at the last moment which stranded us in the middle of rural Virginia. At the time, we had no way of knowing what buses or trains we could catch to continue our journey because there wasn’t a single go-to place online where I could find and compare all available bus or train options for traveling between any two points in the U.S.
It was then that we became determined to create Wanderu, a multi-modal travel search engine that allows people to easily find and book the best deals on travel from point A to point B.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has definitely not been a smooth road but that comes with the territory when you are trying to get a company off the ground and keep it growing.
A service like Wanderu might sound like a common sense practice now, especially since fare aggregators like ours have been the norm in the airline industry for a while, but the ground travel field was really slow to adapt to new technology. In fact, when we were first starting out, many bus company executives were adamant that a service like ours would never be possible for ground travel due to the fact that each carrier used its own unique ticketing technology, or no technology whatsoever.
However, we were able to prove them wrong by building a platform that was able to incorporate all different ways carriers used to issue their tickets and bringing the ones that did not have an online ticketing platform into the digital world.
Wanderu – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Wanderu is a travel search platform that helps people find all available bus and train travel options between any two cities in one place. We are partners with all leading ground travel carriers such as Amtrak, Greyhound, Megabus, and Peter Pan, as well as multiple regional carriers, giving us coverage of more than 50 countries across North America and Europe. We are also actively adding ferry options and working on integrating flight results.
Our goal is to provide travelers with a one-stop shop where they can find all the information they need when it comes to planning a trip from point A to point B. With Wanderu, we completely revolutionized the ground travel industry and the way people book bus and train trips. Prior to Wanderu, travelers had to go to each carrier’s website and manually compare the available options to find the one that best fit their preferences.
As I mentioned earlier, that was not only frustrating, but it was also an unnecessary waste of time having to navigate through a number of tabs on your computer, trying to figure out what travel options to choose. Besides, if you are not familiar with the area, you wouldn’t know what bus or train carriers cover it, so it would be nearly impossible to find all available options.
When we launched Wanderu, we provided a solution to all of those issues that ground travelers were facing. We put all available bus and train travel options for a specific route in one place, so people could easily compare them and find the best one.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Throughout Wanderu’s six years history, we’ve celebrated plenty of amazing accomplishments – getting our first investor check, launching our first private beta, winning the SXSW Accelerator award, etc. – and every time we hit a milestone like that I am most proud of my team for all the hard work and dedication that they deliver on a daily basis.
Last year, for example, we had one of the biggest highlights in the company’s history so far – we became a profitable business. An achievement like that is incredibly rare for such a young startup and I am so proud of everyone who worked really hard to make it happen. We have a small but efficient team and I am constantly impressed with their ability to push the envelope further every single day – that to me is the definition of success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wanderu.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wanderu/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoWanderu/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoWanderu
Image Credit:
Kevin Wolf, Julia Levine
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