Travel Startups Incubator is pleased to announce our investment in PanTrek (BETA) an Online Booking Engine for Inter-City Bus Transportation in Latin America.
The “Expedia of Latin America Bus Travel,” PanTrek provides company profiles, user reviews, and ratings, plus the most comprehensive Latin American bus information available.
PanTrek is an online booking engine designed to help travelers navigate the many challenges of bus travel in Latin American countries. By combining all available companies’ routes and fares onto a single booking engine, PanTrek provides immediate, detailed information regarding the most trusted and affordable transportation providers.
David Feldsott, CEO PanTrek
PanTrek founder and CEO David Feldsott, a former San Francisco investment banker working with software/technology companies, realized the need for a company like PanTrek when he was planning a lengthy trip through Latin America. Having heard from backpackers that it was best to travel by bus in the areas he planned to visit, he found a dearth of dependable information online that would allow him to learn about available bus transportation options. “There were no search or booking engines,” Feldsott says, “and the bus company websites were confusing and outdated. I could barely find schedules or prices, and forget about actually being able to buy tickets online.”
Frustrated, he decided to fix the problem. After six months of research and self-training on the architecture of programming a travel website, he moved to South America and eventually settled in Colombia, where he met his two PanTrek co-founders ‒ senior software engineer and technical team leader Juan Carlos Rodriguez and Alejandro Toro Espinosa, a business development expert. Feldsott then took additional steps toward launching his unique ground transportation travel startup.
One important step involved a focus group in Mexico City that included avid travelers from Central and South America as well as Europe and the U.S. “The results were far better than I could have expected,” Feldsott says, “and the PanTrek concept resonated highly with the test group. Even when a prospective user said they were unlikely to purchase tickets with PanTrek, they still said they would use the website all the time for research.”
Designed to help tourists and backpackers, PanTrek will also help local residents of small towns in Latin America that would benefit from increased tourism. “By giving travelers the ability and confidence to travel by bus,” Feldsott explains, “we hope to bring tourism revenue to under-served, and at times impoverished, communities.”
Feldsott added that while the market opportunity for PanTrek, which exceeds $10 billion, certainly motivates his team, so does the belief that they “have the potential to genuinely improve millions of people’s lives.”
“The inter-city bus market in Latin America touches the lives of over 1 billion people either directly, by offering transportation to local jobs, or indirectly, such as from tourism.” In many smaller communities without local airports, he notes, inter-city transportation offers the only way for residents to visit family, transport goods to market, or receive vital services in other towns. “We believe a lot more people in Latin America would travel by bus if they had more confidence in the bus companies,” he says.
PanTrek is effectively adding much-needed transparency to the inter-city bus market by not only giving the public the ability to easily search routes and purchase tickets online, but by providing reviews, ratings, recommendations, photos, amenity lists, and step-by-step directions.
Matt Zito, Managing Partner at Travel Startups Incubator, says “PanTrek is entering a massive ground transportation market in South America that is ready to move from a traditionally offline transaction to a digitized e-commerce enabled product and service where consumers in Latin America can search and purchase bus transportation in real-time online via the web and mobile.”
Ground transportation, the hottest vertical for investment in the travel industry in the last 2-years continues seeing capital deployed into startups that are launching e-commerce booking engines for bus transportation in India, Asia and South America.
In addition to funding, Travel Startups Incubator is also providing PanTrek with access to mentoring and technical assistance from one of the world’s largest travel technology companies, Amadeus.
“Travel Startups Incubator’s strategic alliance with Amadeus will help us gain access to Amadeus technology experts to advise us on how to create the most advanced search/routing algorithms in the inter-city bus industry,” Feldsott states. Such a resource will allow people to effectively combine trips to create complete, customized itineraries that help ensure they’ll get where they need to go as efficiently as possible. Even in Latin America.
As Feldsott puts it, “PanTrek goes beyond most search aggregators and provides extra information to help put travelers’ minds at ease including our patent-pending social seating feature.”