A rail booking portal for a $65M travel market.
How Avonet became Metro One's development partner for Rail Online - a booking portal navigating 6,000+ European train stations across a $65M travel market, delivered with rail-specific API expertise that compressed their timeline.
Metro One - founded by Kewmaaz Muthalif, James Dunne, and Lachlan McCallum - set out to fill a clear gap in the rail travel market: a single portal where travellers could plan and book train itineraries across Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. With a $65M industry at stake and more than 6,000 European train stations to surface, they needed a development partner with genuine API depth, a proven track record with clients, and a centralised team structure that eliminated the accountability risks of freelance models.
What we were solving
Building a multi-market rail booking portal at scale during pandemic conditions required more than strong technical execution - it required a partner who could translate a complex, evolving business vision into working software without the coordination failures typical of distributed freelance teams.
- Complex multi-provider rail booking system requiring deep API integration across European and Australasian networks
- Pandemic conditions making full-time hiring models impractical for an early-stage platform
- Accountability and communication risks inherent in freelance developer models
- Need for prior domain expertise in rail APIs to minimise the learning curve and compress delivery timelines
What Avonet built
Avonet was selected as Metro One's development partner on the basis of a proven client track record, prior domain experience working with Rail Europe's API ecosystem, and a centralised team structure providing single-point accountability throughout the engagement.
- Full-stack development of the Rail Online booking portal across European, Australian, and New Zealand markets
- Deep API integration with rail networks to surface real-time schedules and enable direct booking
- Prior Rail Europe API experience leveraged to compress integration learning curve and delivery timeline
- Centralised team structure providing consistent stakeholder communication and single-point accountability
Results that speak for themselves.
Rail Online launched as a functional booking portal across three markets, with Avonet's domain experience directly credited with accelerating implementation and reducing time-to-market.
While our core API was new to them, their experience with APIs and integrations played a crucial role in shortening their learning curve. This translated into a lot of time saved during implementation.
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