Peter and Tibi’s travel hack
Train trips made cheap (and gezellig)
Door Eoin Gallagher
By Eoin Gallagher
Eoin Gallagher
Peter Kallai was sitting on the toilet after a shower when he took the call. On the other end was exchange student Alireza Tayebi (Tibi), enthusiastically pitching a business idea. ‘It was just a funny situation,’ says Peter, a Hungarian student of economics and business economics.
But despite the unusual beginning, their partnership has been a success. Now, only five months later, their website GroupTicketFinder, which helps their fellow students find others to travel the country with on a shoestring, has around five hundred users.
‘It’s going amazing’, says Tibi. ‘I’m really surprised by the number of trips we get, and the number of trips that actually get a connection. I didn’t expect this.’
Group chat
It all started when Iranian AI student Tibi arrived in the Netherlands eight months ago. He was eager to see the country, but train tickets were much too pricey for him. So when he heard you can buy tickets for as little as 7 euros if you buy as a group, he was thrilled. The problem: how would he find people to travel with?
‘I decided to set up a WhatsApp group chat to help internationals find others to share their trips with’, he says. ‘And that went crazy. The chat absolutely exploded.’
The WhatsApp group I set up absolutely exploded
Before long, the group chat reached the maximum capacity of 1024 members, and still more people wanted to join. That’s when Tibi knew he was onto something. ‘I wanted to make this into a website’, he says. ‘But I was leaving Groningen that December.’
Still, he couldn’t let his idea go and started working on it like crazy. ‘I got obsessed. This was my life 24/7.’ However, all those hours weren’t enough. He needed a team, and someone with a business mindset. That’s when a friend tipped him about Peter.
‘I immediately heard the enthusiasm and passion Tibi had’, Peter says. ‘I was in after our very first meeting.’
Every student city
They worked hard to make this place into a reality where new students – although anyone can use it – could connect. In March, they were able to launch.
‘You just put in your travel time and your destination and it links you up with people who are going at the same time’, Peter explains. ‘You get each other’s WhatsApp numbers through the website, set up a group chat, and start planning.’
A train ticket is usually more than my Ryanair flight home
Currently, the website is mainly being used in Groningen, but the goal is to have users in every student city. ‘What we see is that we struggle with a lack of credibility, because this is a completely new thing and people are not familiar with it’, Peter says.
Female-only section
Another issue is that some people don’t feel entirely safe meeting up with strangers. ‘We recommend that people meet up at the train station, where it’s crowded, fifteen minutes before departure.’ When they have a bigger user base, they plan on making a female-only section for girls who prefer to travel together.
Psychology student Molly McGrath is not waiting for that to happen. She is already using the ticket finder to get to Schiphol, from where she flies home to Ireland. The price of a regular train ticket from Groningen to Amsterdam is the highest of any ticket in the country. ‘It’s usually more than my Ryanair flight home’, she says.
She is happy she found the website, but wishes she had heard about the WhatsApp group last year. ‘There were a lot of times that I went to Amsterdam to fly either back home or somewhere else and I had to pay 30 euros each way.’
Useful
For Peter, it would also have been useful to have had a site like his when he arrived in the Netherlands. He remembers his first trip from Amsterdam to Groningen, when his train randomly stopped in Zwolle in the middle of the night and he had no idea what was going on. ‘It was just a really strange experience, when you’re there in the middle of nowhere, in a completely new country.’
Fortunately, he met some Dutch guys heading the same way and they managed to organise a taxi for them all to Groningen. Just to have some people to travel with helped him a lot. ‘Even if you travel with as few as three people, it’s far more likely that one of you will know what to do.’
Peter and Tibi are now talking to student associations and the university to promote their website, so when students land next September, they know about it and feel comfortable using it. ‘Two out of three conversations end with people telling us they think it’s a really good initiative’, says Peter.
Positive effect
They hope the website will make money someday, but it is not their main goal. ‘It’s more about providing a great platform for international students’, says Peter. For Tibi, what’s most important is that they’re having a positive effect on people’s lives. ‘I’m receiving some really nice messages from people. It makes my day, honestly.’
One stood out. It was a message thanking him for setting up the group chat he started out with, with a picture of four people he didn’t know clinking their glasses happily in a bar. They had met through the WhatsApp group, became good friends, and later decided to take a road trip together to Turkey. ‘That is a story that really melts my heart’, he says. ‘That’s what this is all about.’