Rome2Rio - 2025 Changemaker at The #Phocuswright Conference
Summary
Wendy Olson Killion, CEO of Rome2rio, presents the company's vision and strategy at the Phocuswright Conference 2025 Changemaker session, followed by a brief interview with senior research analyst Robert Cole. Rome2rio is a multimodal travel search platform that answers the core question of how to get from any point A to any point B — covering planes, trains, automobiles, ferries, funiculars, and more — providing pricing, timing, and route options for door-to-door journeys anywhere in the world.
Killion highlights a major data point from their platform: 45% of searches return a multimodal result, applicable to both domestic and international routes. She frames this as evidence of a 'mobility reset' in the travel market, with surface travel dominating — particularly for trips under 90 miles. She attributes this shift to a combination of regulatory pressures (especially in Europe), changing traveler values around responsible and sustainable travel, and cultural momentum (citing celebrities like Dua Lipa and Anna Kendrick posting train travel content on social media). Train travel, she argues, is no longer just practical — it's cool.
A concrete partnership example shared is Rome2rio's collaboration with Visit Brazil. The initiative aimed to promote less-discovered regions within Brazil — diverse nature escapes and secondary cities beyond Rio and São Paulo — using an interactive multimodal map. The goal was both to inspire travelers and to demonstrate infrastructure access for those destinations, exemplifying what Killion calls 'dispersion by design': using mobility data and storytelling together to direct traveler interest toward under-visited areas.
On AI, Killion outlines three lenses through which Rome2rio approaches it: as a technology tool (they ran a company-wide hackathon with 70% participation, with even the CEO's executive assistant winning a prize for building a people-team efficiency app); as a platform capability (working with LLMs and agents to answer complex traveler queries at scale); and as a people-matching mechanism (pairing on-the-ground human experts who digitize non-digital transport data — physical PDFs from bus stops and train stations — with AI trust and verification layers). Rome2rio's competitive moat, Killion argues, is its global network of regional transport experts who capture data that isn't available digitally, giving the platform a uniquely comprehensive view of global mobility.
On competitive risk from AI, Killion is confident: as long as Rome2rio continues to generate unique, traveler-centric content and partners with LLM companies rather than competing with them, they see their position in the ecosystem as secure. The company, founded in Melbourne nearly 15 years ago, is now expanding globally by placing staff in-market closer to travelers and partners to address time-zone challenges at scale. Rome2rio processes over one billion searches annually.
Key Takeaways
- •45% of Rome2rio platform searches return multimodal results, signaling that travelers increasingly combine transport modes rather than flying point-to-point.
- •Surface travel is dominating for trips under 90 miles, driven by regulation, sustainability values, and cultural shifts — train travel is gaining social cachet.
- •Destinations should move from purely promotional tourism to stewardship models that account for what infrastructure can actually handle, using mobility data to guide that.
- •'Dispersion by design' is a scalable strategy: use multimodal access data and interactive maps to drive traveler interest toward less-discovered regions, not just top-tier POIs.
- •Unique, ground-sourced data is a durable competitive moat — Rome2rio's edge comes from human experts physically digitizing offline transport schedules that no algorithm can scrape.
- •AI should be integrated across the company, not siloed in tech teams — running a broad internal hackathon (70% participation) surfaces implementation ideas from unexpected places, including non-technical staff.
- •Travel platforms can partner with LLMs rather than competing with them, using AI to better answer complex traveler queries while retaining proprietary content as the differentiator.
- •Scale alone is not a differentiator; a billion annual searches is notable but what makes Rome2rio special is the human expertise behind the data.
- •Expanding globally requires placing staff in-market — remote-only structures create friction with partners and travelers across time zones.
- •The more partner data a platform can access, the more effectively it can solve both traveler and destination problems — open data partnerships are mutually beneficial.
Transcript
Hi, I'm Wendy Olsen Killian, CEO of Rome to Rio. Many of you may have heard us of us. Uh, many of you may not have heard from us. We answer one question. How to get from A to any B. We answer that question in a multimodal way. As we think about planes, trains, automobiles, fairies, even an occasional water buffalo, ferniculars, hot air balloons, anything that you can think of, we think about how someone gets from door to door from any two places in the world. Whether you're coming from a major h...
