Rome2Rio Expands Advertising Business, Adds to Executive TeamNew CEO sets goal to triple ad revenue by end of 2026
Rome2RioMar 03, 2025
Melbourne, Australia, and Berlin, Germany (March 3, 2025) - Rome2Rio, the global leader in trip and route planning owned by Omio Group, announced today the expansion of its advertising business to help travelers and destinations discover each other. With its tenured leadership team and expertise within transportation and travel across rail, bus, car, ferry, and plane, Rome2Rio presents destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and transport and lodging partners with a traveler reach that no other travel company can.
Advertising is a natural focus for the company, which helps its over 600 million annual visitors find the most expeditious and convenient ways to journey anywhere in the world. As part of its expansion, Rome2Rio is modernizing and simplifying its core travel product beloved by consumers, while moving away from programmatic and towards inspirational, integrated native and sponsored advertising opportunities. By allowing partners to connect with travelers everywhere in their journey, Rome2Rio will deliver increased value to partners while providing even more travel discovery to its consumers. The company expects to triple its ad revenue by the end of 2026 with this approach.
“Connecting people to new places and experiences has never been more important, and Rome2Rio is the only travel company that can help a broad and diverse range of travelers and travel companies discover each other,” says Rome2Rio CEO Wendy Olson Killion. “DMOs and travel suppliers across the globe can benefit from reaching our travelers on both well-traveled and remote routes during discovery, through in-trip. As a publisher and connector, this is a natural evolution for Rome2Rio.”
Killion, a tenured travel industry veteran who joined the company in 2024, recently restructured the team to focus on growing both operator and advertiser partnerships, delivering key promotions and hires to accelerate these areas. Stuart Thompson, formerly of KAYAK and momondo, was promoted to director of commercial, and former head of global marketing for Expedia Group Media Solutions, Monya Mandich, has been brought on to lead marketing. Killion, Thompson and Mandich will meet with partners at ITB, the world’s largest travel trade show, in Berlin, Germany, March 4-6, 2025.
Rome2Rio reaches travelers at every stage of their journey, from inspiration and discovery, to planning and ultimately partner bookings. Working with booking partners across the globe, it connects its users with the right partners in the right region, whether its thousands of transport partners, or OTAs Booking.com, Expedia Group, Omio, and recently added Despegar to make their travel experience personal and incredible.
About Rome2Rio
Rome2Rio, part of Omio Group, is the global leader in trip and route planning, helping its over 600 million annual visitors find the most cost-efficient, expeditious, and convenient ways to journey anywhere in the world. Available in 240 countries and 10 million+ locations, users can quickly compare and coordinate train, ferry, bus, plane, and car travel as well as discover hotels that meet their travel needs. By simply entering a starting point and destination, Rome2Rio instantly shows the best possible ways to travel between locations with detailed and accurate maps, price estimates, travel times and distances – and direct links to book. For more information, please visit www.rome2rio.com.
About the Omio Group
Since its foundation in 2013, the Omio Group has helped customers discover new ways of travelling. Thanks to its two interconnected platforms, Omio and Rome2Rio, Omio is the world's leading travel platform for searching, comparing, and booking. Omio B2B Partnership services OTAs and mobility providers with bespoke business solutions. Omio supports its customers in their desire to explore Europe, the U.S., and Canada by train, bus, flight, and ferry. Omio sells more than 80,000 tickets daily, employs over 400 staff from more than 50 countries and maintains offices in Berlin, Prague, Melbourne, Bangalore, and London. The Omio Group offers its customers journeys that move them.
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About Rome2Rio
Rome2Rio answers one deceptively simple question that still breaks travel planning in 2026: How do I actually get there?
Used by hundreds of millions of travelers worldwide, Rome2Rio makes every journey discoverable by showing every realistic way to move from A to B. Flights, trains, buses, ferries, rideshares, and even the occasional gondola all surfaced in one clear view. The result is confidence. Travelers can see their options, understand the tradeoffs, and choose the route that fits their time, budget, values, and sense of adventure.
Behind the scenes, Rome2Rio is also a rare window into how people really move around the world. By making global mobility visible and connected, the platform reveals real patterns of human movement that inform smarter travel planning, better destination stewardship, and more responsible tourism.
From Inspiration to Access: Turning Curiosity into Movement
Travel inspiration is everywhere. Access is not. Rome2Rio sits at the moment where curiosity becomes commitment. Travelers may fall in love with a hidden village, a coastal town, or a national park on social media, but they book when they can clearly see how to reach it. Rome2Rio bridges that gap by pairing inspiration with door-to-door access, turning “I want to go” into “I know how to get there.”
This is why the platform is increasingly central to stories about rising interest in secondary and tertiary destinations, slower travel, and deeper cultural exploration.
The Infrastructure Story Reporters Are Missing
Travel rarely happens in one mode or in straight lines. Rome2Rio acts as the connective layer across the world’s fragmented transport systems, stitching together rail, bus, ferry, regional routes, and on demand transfers into a single, navigable journey. It is the only global platform that shows every realistic end to end option, including routes most travelers would never think to search on their own.
As surface first and multimodal travel accelerates, Rome2Rio has become a living map of how infrastructure, traveler values, and behavior are shifting in real time.
Dispersion by Design: From Promotion to Stewardship
Destinations are moving from pure promotion to active stewardship, and Rome2Rio is built for that shift. By making mobility visible, the platform naturally disperses travelers beyond overcrowded hubs and into places that want and can support more visitation. Travelers gain confidence to explore responsibly, and destinations gain a tool to manage where and how visitors flow.
This is sustainability in practice, not theory. It is about showing better options and making them easy to choose.
Human + AI: Why Accuracy Still Matters
Rome2Rio blends large scale AI with something generative systems alone cannot provide: human validated reality.
AI helps model, rank, and surface millions of possible journeys. But people on the ground keep the data honest, up to date, and locally relevant, capturing ferry schedules, bus routes, and regional connections no API includes. That combination is what makes Rome2Rio a trusted source for both travelers and the industry at a moment when confidence and accuracy matter more than ever.
Mar 03, 2025
