fromAtoB

» see fromatob.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Three graduates of RWTH Aachen spun fromAtoB out of the university in 2008. The problem they picked was real and unglamorous. Getting from one European city to another meant asking a rail operator and then asking a coach operator, each selling on its own site with its own idea of what a booking class meant, and nobody would put the two answers next to each other because nobody had any reason to.

So fromAtoB did. It searched across modes and stitched them into one trip where that made sense, then sold the result through its web and mobile apps. The company moved its center of gravity to Berlin while keeping the Aachen office. By 2013 roughly 2.5 million people a month were hitting the site, and a seven-figure Series A arrived that November from Seedfonds Aachen and Seventure Partners, with the angel Daniel Wild alongside them.

The money did not last as long as the traffic. In December 2017 the company filed for insolvency, nine years in, with the product working. The assets went to Tank & Rast, the operator of most of the service areas on the German autobahn network, which is a stranger buyer than it sounds until you remember that a motorway rest stop is also in the business of people traveling between cities. Tank & Rast put the site under a subsidiary called Pinion Digital and kept it running.

The coverage map is why this one never reached me. fromAtoB indexed European rail and coach operators, and Turkey's intercity travel does not sit on that network. The country moves on a coach system dense enough that the comparison fromAtoB existed to make had an obvious answer almost everywhere, and by the time the high-speed line between Ankara and Istanbul opened in 2014 and a train was worth pricing against a bus, the company was three years from its own insolvency filing.

~ the record ~

~ the timetables nobody would share ~

The last year was fifty operators and about 1.5 million searches a month, which is not a dead product. It is a product with no revenue, because a percentage of tickets nobody is buying comes to nothing. The company's own statement in December 2020 said it plainly: after months of working hard and hoping for better times, it had to face up to the travel industry not having recovered.

ALLRAIL, the European trade body for independent rail operators, read the closure differently and said so in January 2021. Its argument was that state-owned rail incumbents dictate punitive contractual conditions to anyone trying to resell their tickets, and withhold the real-time data that would make a third-party planner actually useful. The demise of fromAtoB, it said, shows there is market failure and antitrust action is urgently needed. Both explanations can be true at once, and the pandemic is the one that arrived with a date on it.

~ who answers at the domain now ~

fromatob.com is live. It returns 200 in German, with a working origin-and-destination search box sitting above a list of German cities. A probe that only reads status codes will file this grave as a survival.

Read the imprint. The site belongs to one Tassilo Pilati at an address on Schwedlerstraße in Frankfurt am Main, it advertises carpool listings rather than rail tickets, and its outbound links go to lalaauto.com and to a phone app whose Android package name is mitfahrgelegenheit.city. Pinion Digital is nowhere on the page. Somebody picked up a twelve-year-old travel brand with residual search traffic and pointed it at a ridesharing funnel, and the search box on the front of it is decoration.

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