Wanderu recently came out of beta with the public launch of its service for the Northeast US region,

The round was led by Alta Ventures , an early-stage capital firm in Mexico. Investors include Craig Lentzsch, Jeff Clarke (the chairman of Orbitz ), Semyon Dukach, Drummond Road Capital, and Bill Kaplan.
Wanderu recently came out of beta with the public launch of its service for the Northeast US region, where it covers routes cheap car rentals orlando florida linking cities with remote college towns. The startup plans to expand nationwide.
Direct connections with carrier systems are important for Wanderu to provide up-to-date schedules, pricing, and availability, and deep linking users to the end of the booking flow. It s the first bus metasearch site to offer real-time trip verification before consumers begin booking a trip on a participating carrier.
Wanderu does have direct partnerships with a dozen carriers, though it s lacking Megabus , the other player. Perhaps the funding round will be the milestone that will convince the major bus lines to overcome cheap car rentals orlando florida technological hurdles and participate.
Wanderu still doesn t have a direct connect cheap car rentals orlando florida for ticketing with Greyhound Lines , the largest of the US bus companies, but it is adding Lentzsch, the operator s former CEO to its board of directors, which might help give it insight into landing a deal. In a promising start, the company has successfully integrated ticketing from Greyhound s subsidiary BoltBus .
Wanderu doesn t just have to handle the technology challenge but it also has to invent standards. While all of the air industry players have agreed to unified programming and coding standards, none of that is in place for US bus and rail ticketing, essentially. Wanderu is inventing unified data standards.
The company was founded a year ago by Polina Raygorodskaya, Igor Bratnikov and Eddy Wong. In March, Wanderu won SXSW Interactive Accelerator Innovative Web Technology award, an accompishment achieved by Hipmunk cheap car rentals orlando florida and Siri in previous years).
The funding round puts Wanderu much farther ahead of its rivals in this category in the US: Other bus ticketing metasearch startups like Bustripping is still struggling to gain traction . Meanwhile, Bus Catchers heavy reliance on web scraping led to legal pressure from major bus operators and the startup decided to move on in order to avoid having to catch a bus to federal court.
cheap car rentals orlando florida The US market for inter-city buses is growing. In 2011 and 2012, passenger volume for curb-side, long-distance bus operators like Megabus and BoltBus grew by 30%, according to a study released in January by DePaul University.
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