Under French law, July 9, 2015 called the ‘Macron Bill, ‘free-trade’ con­di­tions for inter­re­gion­al bus ser­vices were intro­duced and, con­se­quent­ly, an increas­ing num­ber of trav­ellers have cho­sen this mode of trans­port. The num­ber of com­pa­nies has lit­er­al­ly tak­en off and it now is exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to com­pare prices. For this very rea­son, viz., to sim­pli­fy plan­ning and tick­et buy­ing for trav­ellers, Tic Tac Trip was cre­at­ed by Hugo Bazin (ESCP-Europe, BBA-ESSEC) and Simon Robain, a 2015 UTC grad­u­ate in the major Com­put­er Sci­ences and Applications. 

Simon Robain was one of the many entre­pre­neur­ial-mind­ed UTC under­grad­u­ates. “Indeed, I chose to study at UTC-Com­pieg­ne because I already had this incli­na­tion to cre­ate a start-up, although at the time, I had no idea in what area this might be”. So, it was dur­ing his study years that his ideas matured. “I trav­elled a lot round Europe when I was a stu­dent and always had dif­fi­cul­ty in find­ing bus tick­ets that suit­ed me and, more impor­tant­ly, my trans­port bud­get. With co-founder Hugo, we decid­ed to set up ta start-up that would answer these prob­lems”.

Simon and Hugo togeth­er first con­tact­ed over 70 Euro­pean bus com­pa­nies to get their time-tables and prices. Then they devel­oped an algo­rith­mic com­para­tor to select the 5 best trip offers between two cities. “Fol­low­ing that”, adds Simon, “our com­para­tor then com­pares prices and dis­plays a selec­tion, depend­ing on whether the trav­eller wants the cheap­est, the most rapid trip, with or with­out changes en route…”.

Today (the site only went on line in Sep­tem­ber 2016), there are already 800 reg­is­tered prospect ‘clients’. Simon explains this suc­cess eas­i­ly “Our big advan­tage com­pared with oth­er trav­el advi­sors is that we pro­pose com­bi­na­tions of com­pa­nies for a giv­en trip. And if, for the moment, we are focused on bus trav­el, we shall soon be expand­ing our busi­ness to include train trips, co-dri­ving … and, why not, air travel!”

How­ev­er, to mark the dif­fer­ence with the com­peti­tors, our two entre­pre­neurs hope to rely a lot on the oth­er, asso­ciate ser­vices pro­posed on their site. “We have added lists of hotels close to the des­ti­na­tions if the route with stopovers is long. And we are study­ing – with the com­pa­nies con­cerned — the pos­si­bil­i­ty of our cus­tomers pur­chas­ing their tick­ets via our site, which of course needs some spe­cif­ic agree­ments and gain the com­mer­cial sta­tus as trav­el agents. We are work­ing hard on this ques­tion of asso­ciate ser­vices: car hire, accom­mo­da­tion, meal pack­ages deliv­ered to the bus just before depar­ture … we have loads of ideas to explore! But our busi­ness objec­tive is to nar­row down the sup­ply side to select and retain only the very best and to be able to offer our cus­tomers a real­ly sim­ple and prac­ti­cal service.”

https://www.tictactrip.eu