GoEuro Touts Growth in Ground Transport But Sees No Profit in Sight
Photo Credit: Naren Shaam, CEO, managing director, and founder, of GoEuro, shown here with a backdrop of Berlin, Germany, where his travel startup is based. The company claims rapid growth in offering multi-modal travel search. GoEuro
Skift Take
GoEuro CEO Naren Shaam said his company is having strong growth in helping consumers book intercity trips on their smartphones. But can he guide his company into profitability?
Five years ago this summer, GoEuro debuted to stand out from most established travel companies by showing consumers rail, intercity coach, and flights side-by-side.
Back then no one predicted that the concept was promising enough for the Berlin-based company to eventually raise $145 million from top-tier venture capital firms.
To scale, GoEuro faced a classic chicken-or-egg problem. Suppliers wouldn't bother to work with it unless it had customers. Customers wouldn't use it unless it had tickets from big companies on popular routes.
GoEuro addressed the issue by listing offers and encouraged users to click out to suppliers for booking. The user experience was poor for customers, however, especially on mobile devices — which many rail and bus operators weren't optimized to handle.
So the company pivoted away from metasearch, or price-comparison. Since 2016, GoEuro has been primarily a travel agency when it comes to rail and bus bookings. Today nearly all of its rail bookin
