Introducing our new COO, Sean Shannon

Four years ago, we started Busbud in my apartment with the mission of creating an app that would make life easier for bus travellers around the world. We’ve worked tirelessly since then to assemble the largest bus inventory worldwide, covering today more than 500,000 routes in 10,000 cities in 63 countries. We’ve grown our “lean and mean” team to 40 team members that go the extra mile everyday to help bus travellers worldwide have a great journey. Today, we’re excited to add a new team member to further fulfill our mission.

I am very pleased to welcome our new COO, Sean Shannon, to the Busbud team!

Most recently, Sean served as Managing Director of Expedia for Canada, Latin America and Australia/New Zealand. Sean scaled Expedia Canada from its early days to well over USD $2B in annual bookings, led Expedia’s expansion into Latin America, and then oversaw the fast growing business in Australia/New Zealand. He brings to Busbud a wealth of knowledge with 25+ years of executive leadership experience. I’m excited to add his domain expert knowledge of the global travel industry to our team.

Sean will head up our commercial operations. A Toronto native, he will spend most of his time in the Montreal office with our team, but also travel to meet with Busbud’s international partners.

Taking it to the next level: international and mobile

I am pleased that Sean is joining our team at a time of fast growth, with 600% revenue growth in the last 12 months and as we are ramping up our global expansion plans. Busbud now covers 63 countries, mainly across Europe, North America and South America. In the next 12 months, we will be scaling our local presence in many countries, offering our website and app to bus travellers worldwide. But we know that happens with satisfied customers, one bus trip at a time!

We’ve been very happy to read your positive comments about our new Android app. You’ve told us recently that it was “100% amazing”, “so easy and friendly” and even “smooth”, but you’ve also shared many great ideas for new features that we will work on in coming months. Thanks for all the great feedback! It’s also been fantastic to see our Android app featured this week at the Google I/O conference! Mobile has always been a key part of our vision, and we will continue to expand our feature set on both iOS and Android to make it even easier to book your bus travel while you are on the go!

Busbud Business

Today, we are also proud to announce a new milestone in our quest to make bus travel easier around the world. With the launch of Busbud Business, we are opening up our bus booking API to select travel partners to make our intercity bus inventory available on their platforms in the coming weeks.

Concretely, we will offer new API, white label and widget tools that travel sites and apps can integrate into their product to offer bus ticketing to their audiences. A dozen major travel companies have recently signed distribution agreements with Busbud allowing them to increase their revenues while giving travellers more transportation choices.

This represents an 8-month engineering effort where our team overhauled many parts of technology stack, notably around caching and performance, to meet our partner’s needs. This was also a great hustle by our Partnerships team. APIs and B2B distribution are an important aspect of the travel industry landscape, where many players such as Expedia, Booking.com, Skyscanner and Google Flights all have APIs and power other travel websites with their flights and hotel inventory.

Busbud’s vision is to make the world more accessible. By building the largest bus inventory and allowing third party access, Busbud is committed to making the affordable and eco-friendly bus travel option more present in the minds of consumers around the world.

Welcome aboard, Sean! We look forward to taking Busbud to the next level together and to keep offering the best-in-class experience for bus travellers worldwide. We also look forward to trying, over the next few years, to make you a Montreal Canadiens fan!
Read more about the Busbud Business launch:

• Busbud Launches Bus Booking B2B Platform, Adds Former Expedia Managing Director as COO
• Busbud Business microsite
• The Road to the Busbud Business API and Beyond by Christophe Naud-Dulude (Development Lead)
• About Busbud
• Contact: pr@busbud.com