Europe’s fragmented transport market is often treated as a structural weakness. For Omio CTO Tomáš Vocetka, however, that complexity may become an advantage as AI systems increasingly depend on accurate data, interoperability, and reliable infrastructure.
Omio connects thousands of transport providers across dozens of markets, bringing rail, bus, ferry, and air travel into a single booking experience. In this written interview, Vocetka discusses the technical challenge of integrating legacy systems, the rise of conversational travel tools, the importance of trust in AI-powered services, and what startups can learn from building across Europe’s fragmented markets.
Why do you believe Europe’s fragmented markets could become a competitive advantage in the AI era?
Nobody is pretending that fragmentation is the easy route. Building a business across Europe means dealing with different languages, regulations, payment systems and infrastructure networks. It creates a level of complexity that companies in more unified markets simply do not face. However, that complexity may also have forced European companies to develop capabilities that become increasingly valuable in the AI era.
Take Omio as an example. We connect more than 3,000 transport providers across 47 countries, and every operator works differently. There is no universal standard for ticketing, inventory, pricing or operations. From day one, we had to build technology that could work across borders, across markets and across legacy systems.
As AI becomes part of how people search, buy and manage everyday services, AI will have to operate in environments that are fragmented, heavily regulated and often built on legacy infrastructure – whether that’s travel, healthcare, financial services or government services. European companies have been operating in that reality for years. In many cases, they’ve already built the technology needed to connect fragmented markets and make them usable for consumers. That creates an opportunity for Europe to produce more global technology leaders. In that sense, some of Europe’s long-standing challenges could become strengths.
Omio connects more than 3,000 transport partners across 47 countries. What is the biggest technical challenge of building a platform on top of such fragmented infrastructure?
The biggest challenge is maintaining accuracy across an ecosystem that is constantly changing. Every single day, schedules shift, fares fluctuate, and disruptions occur across multiple operators, each with their own systems and business rules.
Customers only see the final result and expect their journey to run exactly as planned. While our initial hurdle was standardising this real time chaos, successfully solving it has become our greatest asset.
Mastering this data fragmentation is no longer just a travel industry advantage. It is the exact solution needed to overcome the hurdle currently holding back the artificial intelligence revolution. Reports show that 70 percent of enterprise data is not clean enough for AI, and over a quarter of organisations are losing more than 5 million dollars a year to data quality problems. It proves a simple point. If the underlying infrastructure is fragmented and the data is inaccurate, even the most advanced AI will fail to deliver.
AI agents and conversational interfaces are changing how people interact with digital products. How do you think they will transform travel experiences and customer expectations?
Conversational search is fundamentally transforming customer expectations. We are moving from a world where travellers have to do the hard work of comparing routes to one where they expect instant, personalised answers.
This shift in behaviour completely changes how companies must reach their customers. For years, travel businesses optimised around traditional search engines and apps. Going forward, people will want to search wherever they are. We are already seeing the early stages of this shift today. Google is pushing users towards AI Overviews, and ChatGPT is becoming a starting point for travel discovery, with Omio now directly inside the platform.
And these chat interfaces are only a stepping stone. Travel is inherently experiential, and customer expectations will soon push beyond text, demanding innovations that bring a much more visual, interactive product to life.
As AI becomes embedded into critical consumer journeys, trust becomes increasingly important. How do you think about reliability, transparency, and trust when deploying AI at scale?
When AI powers critical parts of a customer journey, the stakes are naturally higher. Customers think about trust in terms of outcome. Was the information accurate? Did the booking actually work? That is why we view AI as just one part of a much broader system. It requires robust engineering, secure infrastructure, and strict safety guardrails.
Transparency is just as crucial. People need to know when they are interacting with AI and what it is doing for them. We do not treat AI as a special exception to the rules. The exact same rigorous standards we apply to privacy, security, and customer protection apply to our AI tools.
Ultimately, trust is not something you can manufacture. It is earned through consistency. Customers will happily embrace AI powered services, provided they know the platform is accurate, reliable, and accountable if something goes wrong.
If interoperability is the foundation of the future digital economy, what lessons can other startups learn from Omio’s experience connecting thousands of independent systems into a single user experience?
The biggest lesson is that true interoperability is not just a technical problem but a ‘translation’ challenge. When you connect thousands of independent systems, you quickly realise that every provider speaks a slightly different language.
Startups often underestimate the sheer operational grind required to standardise that messy, real world data. You cannot just plug APIs together and expect a seamless product. You have to build a unified layer that makes sense of it all.
This leads to the most important point. Customers should never feel that complexity. They do not care about how many systems you have integrated or how hard the engineering was. In our case, they just have a destination, a budget, and a preference for how they want to travel.
So my takeaway for any startup building in the digital economy is this. Your value is directly proportional to the amount of friction you absorb. If you force the customer to understand the complexity of your industry to use your product, you have failed. Do the heavy lifting behind the scenes and create a single, effortless experience on the surface.
How does Omio differentiate itself from other travel platforms in Europe and internationally and what role does its B2B distribution business play in that strategy?
We built Omio to solve a simple problem: booking transport between countries is often far more complicated than it should be. Today, Omio connects more than 3,000 transport providers across rail, bus, ferry and air, allowing travellers to search, compare and book journeys in one place.
The strength of that network is reflected not only in Omio’s consumer business, but also in its B2B distribution business. Today, companies including TUI, Uber, Kayak, Google, Iryo Conecta, LNER and easyGroup use Omio’s technology to power transport booking experiences for their own customers. Our partners can connect to a global network of operators, while leaving Omio to handle the complexity of payments, ticketing and localisation behind the scenes.
When you look a few years ahead, what do you want Omio to represent within global travel?
Omio’s ambition is to become the intelligence for global mobility. As AI transforms how people discover, plan and book travel, our role is to provide the trusted data, inventory and operational infrastructure that connects a highly fragmented transport industry. We want to be the standardised connection layer between transport operators, partners and the systems built on top of them, making it possible to coordinate journeys seamlessly across borders and modes. If we achieve that, Omio will become synonymous with global transport, making journeys simpler, smarter and more seamless across borders and modes of transport.
