Great. Well, thanks for having me. What I'll try to do is to go through. I have a pretty short presentation, about 10 slides, pretty high level. I'll try to take 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes on that, and then we can, I guess, open to Q&A. I think most people actually know BlaBlaCar, but we started as a long-distance carpooling app. Essentially allowing drivers to share their car when they drive along, and passengers can book those empty seats in those cars, just like they book a seat in a plane or a train or in a bus. I'll jump to the next slide.
Over the next three years or two years, I should say, since really 2018, we started to diversify into a broader offering, which goes beyond the core use case and the unique use case of carpooling that we've created over the years, and to tap into the larger mobility market, or at least long-distance mobility market, which made us go into buses, which will make us go eventually into offering trains as well on the platform. Most of the presentation is actually focused on that, really the last couple of years and the future. I won't go back to sort of the root and the exciting story of BlaBlaCar in the early days. Really about the transformation we've done over the last really two years from becoming just a carpooling community to becoming more of a multimodal platform for travel.
If you look at where we are in that, I would say transformation, we're still obviously dominated by carpooling. Carpooling, as I described, is fundamentally a C2C marketplace. It's drivers offering empty seats in their car, passengers booking those seats. It's a fantastic business in a sense that it has zero inventory risk. Essentially, we don't pre-purchase those cars. We don't obviously buy the cars. We don't employ the drivers. They just happen to be math teachers or students driving across the country with empty seats in their cars. Interestingly, there is also no inventory risk for the drivers. Right? It's not just like you push the inventory risk elsewhere. There is just no inventory risk in this business. You're just filling up seats that are empty in cars. The business model is a transaction business model on carpooling.
Essentially we have a commission on every transaction. Fundamentally, it's a very high gross margin business at 90%. The way we entered into becoming a broader multimodal play was by offering buses. We've done that in two different ways, and we've done that in two different ways because the European market is fundamentally different from the rest of the world when it comes to buses. If you look at Europe, it's a market that actually liberalized, at least continental Europe, I should say, is a market that actually liberalized quite recently in 2015 and 2016. It was a market where people were not taking long-distance coach. They were only taking either trains or carpooling to some extent. That market get consolidated pretty quickly. Today, essentially, you end up with mostly two, maybe three actors in continental Europe.
We decided to launch through the acquisition of Ouibus, what I would call the virtual operator, where essentially we contract bus companies that own fleet, that they either deploy for school or local transport or events or corporate events or whatnot. Essentially, we contract them to run specific lines. We do, in that business, take an indirect inventory risk, in a sense that essentially you sort of prepay specific lines with bus operators. You have essentially a contract, so you don't own the bus, you don't employ the bus driver, and you end up with a very flexible network and ability to reshape your network. It is a fairly low gross margin business model because essentially you pre-purchase to some extent the seats that you resell. You do take some indirect inventory risk even though you don't own the buses.
Outside of Europe, the way we went about buses is a slightly different game, where essentially those are very large bus markets, highly fragmented, very unsophisticated, and mostly offline. Today they're like 80%, 90% still offline. It's your typical offline to online play, essentially, where you go in, you build technology. In our case, we built like a GDS a la Amadeus for Sabre for the airline industry, and an OTA layer. Essentially, we digitalize this sort of old school bus industry in Russia, in Ukraine, in Brazil, and in the future, in every emerging market. It's really an OTA play, which is very high gross margin as well. It's 80% gross margin. You don't have inventory risk. Obviously, the carriers do, but essentially you sell, I would say, a few seats in plenty of buses, just like a Booking.com in the hotel industry.
The beauty of all of that, so I just highlighted the three legs, I would say, of the business we operate. All of that is aggregated within one app, right? Essentially, as a passenger, you just go on BlaBlaCar, you see all this inventory of car and buses. We'll add train at some point, and you're just one click away, one booking away from booking a seat in a car or a bus. That's a brief summary. I'm assuming you see the slides, by the way. I don't know if it works on yours. Okay, great. I probably won't go back into that, maybe just highlight a few things about the difference between those different business legs or business model. I think what's interesting is also to think about the market itself.
If you look at the market of carpooling, it's a market where today, I would say we created that market and be very dominant. We don't have direct competition on carpooling, whether it's in Brazil or in Russia or in France or in Spain. It's purely about market creation. If you ask me, what's the market size for carpooling? Frankly, I don't know. It's about you building a better experience and a better matching algorithm so that you can match drivers and passengers. The amount of cars and empty seats in cars is just humongous. The challenge here is not offline to online, it's not looking at transport data, it's really about building a great product experience, and it's about market creation. It's also very much driven by product and tech.
Over time, we went from, I would say, a pretty simple sort of classified-type product where drivers would go on the platform and create a profile, and they say, "I'm driving from Paris to Lyon, and I'd like to get EUR 25 a seat," to something that's a lot more powered by machine learning, where today, essentially, we are getting to a point where essentially the driver doesn't put a price, puts just a starting point and an end point, and we match the driver in time, in price, and in location, and we define stops along the way so that the driver can pick up and drop off passengers along the way, and we optimize the price of every sub-leg. Today it's 25, 30% of the matching between passenger and driver is actually generated by machine learning.
We define the pickup and drop-off point and the price of every subsegment. Long term, as you fast-forward, maybe 80%, if not 100%, of carpooling stops and prices will be defined by machine learning and not defined by a driver. That's important because as you do that, you clearly bring the concept of dynamic pricing into carpooling. You also create a multitude of pickup and drop-off stations or virtual stations, if you like, that just create a better network. That's the challenge on carpooling. BlaBlaBus is an interesting business because it's really a European thing so far. It's really the way the bus industry is shaped in Europe with today, essentially two actors. We have FlixBus out of Germany, and you have us. We acquired a company called Ouibus to accelerate our presence in this market. It's actually born out of deregulation in Europe.
It's a sizable market, it's actually fundamentally capped by trains. Most of the markets in Europe have good and highly subsidized train networks, the like of SNCF and Deutsche Bahn and so on. There is a pretty large market in the middle, it's nowhere close to emerging markets. If you look at the, what I call the bus marketplace segment, the last one on the right. Again, it's a marketplace OTA-type business model. It's a very large market in countries like, again, Russia, Ukraine, all of LATAM, India, Mexico. You're talking about tens of billions of euros actually of GMV generated by the bus industry in those countries. It's interesting here because it's one of these rare, maybe one of the unique almost I would say asset class in transport that has not gone online in those markets.
People, strangely enough, still buy 90% of their bus ticket in Brazil, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Mexico, offline at the station. It's evolving fast. It's changing. The technology to crack that problem is actually not just building a nice sort of, I would say, top user layer, but it's actually building all the technology stack enabling actually those SMEs, so these sort of tiny Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian bus business to actually digitalize the entire inventory and manage the entire inventory online. The key, I would say, product and tech block we're building here is actually a GDS. It's a global distribution system that allows us to do online distribution on BlaBlaCar. You have the hidden part of the iceberg is actually below BlaBlaCar, and that's the GDS layer.
That partially came out of the acquisition of Busfor in Ukraine and Russia because they had built fantastic technology to crack that problem in the region. We combined that with our own technology, and that's how we are entering the Brazilian market today. Starting from the supply side again, we have these three legs. Obviously, the two new ones are the bus ones. If you look at the third one, the bus marketplace is by far the most scalable, because the same technology we deploy around buses can be applied to trains, shuttle. Essentially, once you build a coherent GDS, IMS, GDS, and OTA layer, you can start to connect essentially thousands of operators on the platform. Today, essentially, our goal is to connect as many operators as possible in as many country as possible, and combine that with carpooling to have a highly differentiated offer.
Now, I talked a lot about the supply side, but I guess if we look at the passenger journey and why going multimodal for us is interesting. It first comes from the belief, and a pretty simple one that most people would agree with, that as you enrich your offer, you attract more demand, right? We went from just being a carpooling app to combining carpooling and buses. Long-term, the end vision is really to start combining all of that. It's interesting when you own a very granular network with carpooling to combine that with other means of transport, because the car remains the universal connector. If you think of most of the journeys you take by train, by plane, there is very often a car at the beginning, a car at the end.
The car remains the universal point-to-point connector for most of us. The end vision is not just to put carpool and buses and train side by side, but it's really to start combining those mode of transport together. By doing so, you end up having very unique offer on your app, not just by carpooling, but by combining those journeys. That's, I would say, the unicity of USP of BlaBlaCar, is to be combining carpooling with these different mean of transport. Now, maybe for you to visualize what we mean when we talk about complementarity and granularity of the network, I think that slide is pretty interesting, where essentially we show on one side the number of bus stations or cities we connect with BlaBlaBus in France, and the number of pickup and drop-off points, mostly generated by machine learning on carpooling.
I think when you see that, you realize that actually you're building two very complete different network. The topology of the carpooling network is highly granular. In other way, carpooling is not very good at doing center Paris to center of Brussels. Buses and trains are good for that. Carpooling is good to go from some suburb of Paris to your small town in Brittany. That's really good at that because your alternative is either you drive your own car or you take a train and a bus and another train and a taxi to get there. By combining those two, essentially, we tend to respond to two slightly different use cases on a very similar audience, which is a pretty young, price-sensitive audience. The other thing that's interesting here, and going more into financial or unit economics topics.
The beauty of carpooling is because we have this unique inventory, we have a very strong captive audience, and very high quality user profile. When you use carpooling, you need to sign up, you need to give us a mobile number, you need obviously to pay online, you verify your ID, you give us your license plate of your car, and so on and so on. We created, because we need to create trust in carpooling, we created a very rich community, and essentially, the consequence of that is we don't buy traffic, right? The main thing on carpooling is carpooling brings free traffic for free. If we look at most of the markets, we actually don't spend much in marketing, and that's what you see with the bar chart on the left.
Actually, 87% of the traffic on BlaBlaCar, and the passengers booking a carpool trip on BlaBlaCar are not paid, right? It's quite unique to a normal OTA. Normal OTA do depend a lot on paid marketing and SEA, and essentially they end up spending a lot of money on Google to attract traffic. We don't. The beauty is, as we start to add actually other mean of transport, starting with buses, as I just described, actually, you don't change your CAC all that much because you benefit from this very wide audience that historically was only booking carpooling, and then you start to increase your share of wallet within this audience. They tend to come back even more because they see that you have more than carpooling.
Essentially you have a very interesting phenomenon where your LTV is improving because you increase your share of wallet per user. In fact, even your CAC, and that's what we show here, over time. We don't show the exact number because we want to keep that confidential, but you see the relative drop of the cost of acquisition per new passenger is dropping because essentially you're better at responding at any demand because you start to aggregate the entire market. Which for us is the case in countries like France, Russia increasingly, Ukraine as well, increasingly in Brazil. I talked a bit about that on carpooling specifically. As you can tell, the old story sort of to some extent rely on having carpooling as an element in the equation.
People often ask us, "Why don't you launch the pure bus business in some countries where you don't have carpooling?" I think all the magic in terms of whether it's CAC to LTV or having all these granular trips comes from carpooling and the fact that we created a very strong community around carpooling. The future of carpooling is also very much around technology.
Over the last two years, and I mentioned that a bit earlier, we've been building great technology to move from, I would say, a classified business on which you bolt on a transaction-based model, which was BlaBlaCar three, four years ago, to more of a machine learning play, where essentially you create another barrier to entry beyond liquidity of the marketplace around being smart at essentially finding pickup and drop off along the way for drivers and being smart about optimizing the price point at which you can find a match between a driver and a passenger. I believe that's pretty fundamental because as we do that, essentially it becomes extremely hard to replicate a business like that. Extremely hard because you need millions of people with a trusted profile, which is the first element of matching.
You need to know who's in the car and feel comfortable with who you're going to share the car with. What's something else that's powered by volume and data, which is like, what are the good pickup and drop off area in a country, and what's the right price to match supply and demand? Again, today, we slowly transformed, and it's really transparent to users. That's the beauty of it. The complexity is really integrated. Today, it's even more now than 25% of carpooling matches are purely generated by machine learning. Meaning drivers did not plan to do this detour or pick up or drop off people in those specific location, and they did not choose the price. It's been purely computed by a matching algorithm. We believe that's the future of carpooling. As we do that, we increase usage of carpooling.
As we do that, essentially, you get this fundamental advantage over the other means of transport such as buses initially and probably more as we go along. I guess these days, no presentation is complete without a COVID update. Obviously, the current crisis has been bad for transport, bad for tourism. It's been a pretty rough ride in Q2 2020. Having said that, we've seen a pretty remarkable rebound starting in June. Still today, by the way, the curve is still going up. We are right now at - 15%, - 20% versus 2019 in terms of passengers transported on BlaBlaCar. It keeps on slowly going up. To compare that to other means of transport, actually, buses are still, and we know that because we operate BlaBlaBus in Europe. Buses tend to be 50%-60% down on 2019.
Train seem to be 30%+ to 40% down depending on countries. Obviously air travel is 70%-80% down. Surprisingly or not surprisingly, carpooling has rebounded extremely well out of this crisis and it's still essentially sustaining those level right now in October for several reasons. One, you don't need to think about the network. As I said earlier, it's community-based. In June or July when things reopened, when every company struggled thinking like, "Well, should we put a bus line or a train line, or should we fly planes here and there?" You don't know because the demand is unpredictable. Essentially, we had a lazy job. We did nothing. Drivers came back, passengers came back, and they started to book again. Within a few weeks, 60%-70% of the network was back up actually within a very short period of time.
We've also seen that on the passenger side there was a clear preference in many markets for carpooling within this audience because you minimize the number of contacts. You had lots of passengers thinking that, well, if I need to choose between a bus or a train or a carpool, I'd rather be with three people in a car than 40 people or hundreds of people in a bus or a train. Funnily enough, actually, the biggest challenge we have right now is actually making sure we can get the drivers back and get new drivers on board. We have too much demand, actually. To give you a sense in several markets, but I'll take France as an example. In France, actually, we are at 15% higher demand year-over-year versus 2019. If you are in France right now, it seems surreal.
It seems surreal because trains are completely empty. The country is half shut down. That's the point. Essentially, the fact that the other mean of transport are being depleted, actually carpool becomes the alternative. We see a model shift toward carpooling from buses. We see bus network are quasi shut down. Train networks are operating but at lower scale. You see a transfer toward carpooling. It's interesting for us because, A, it's very sustainable. We don't have fixed costs in the business. We do operate at lower volume than expected, obviously, which is not great. It's highly resilient. And as it's going to bounce back, we all hope it's going to bounce back, I don't know when, maybe spring 2021, maybe earlier. Essentially, we gained market share, and we gained essentially more customers in the customer mix.
It also enables us to think a bit more like midterm and long-term, to 2021 and beyond, and not burn too much cash along the way while being relevant for users. Today, we're one of the most relevant on this young, low-cost segment, I would say, we're one of the most relevant transport network in countries like France and Spain and Russia and Ukraine and Brazil. To some extent, I would say the length of the crisis is not such a bad thing for us because it's really the differential pain, I would say, between what we suffer and what competition is suffering is going in the right direction for us. That's COVID. Maybe to give you a sense of where we come from and the impact of COVID.
Back, I was saying that earlier in the presentation, the run rate of the last three months, actually pre-COVID, was around 85 million passengers, growing roughly at 55% year on year. Late 2019 and early 2020 was actually an acceleration for us. Obviously, that acceleration went down with COVID. We anticipate we'll do around 50 million passengers in 2020, obviously down on 2019. We expect, frankly it's crystal ball in term of demand, that model assumes partial recovery in H1 and 90% recovery of overall demand in H2. Remember, the fact we grow in 2021 is not a function of market growing. It's a function of offline to online migration accelerating in emerging market, which we see now, actually, during the COVID phase. The fact that inherently, we've built actually larger market share during 2020.
The drop of 71- 50 is not the drop you see for bus companies or even train companies and never mind airlines. We believe actually because we've built a bigger relative market share during the crisis, as it comes back, actually we should be able to partially maintain in most markets that market share. Last but not least, and getting out of the COVID topic for a minute. It's always been important for us to also do something that makes sense, I mean for us, for the employees, for the users. As a reminder, actually, the activity in 2019 saved 1.6 million tons of CO2, and that's something that's not been a back on the envelope calculation.
We've done that with a consulting firm, actually, that came and analyzed all the model shift, actually, that carpooling is creating. It has a massive positive impact, which is good in many ways. It's obviously good in the current environment. It's also a very strong sense of purpose for many of our drivers. If you look at the carpooling drivers, they're not professional. They're just people sharing their private space. Of course, they do that for financial reasons. Not just, they also do that for a deeper sense of purpose around the social benefit of meeting people and the environmental benefit of not driving alone. That enables, I would say, all the economics I talked about are also powered by the pretty strong brand image we created.
Maybe a good proxy of that is the NPS, net promoter score, of BlaBlaCar in every market is anywhere between 45 and 70 actually, which for transport is extremely high and higher than any other mean of transport. Again, that translates that sense of purpose, the fact that people feel they're doing something that makes sense for the future, and the fact they have a fantastic experience, that translates into those economics and this better sort of unique economics idea I described on the free traffic. I'll end on that note with slightly outdated numbers, but actually not quite. They're quite good. 22 countries with close to 100 million members signed up, and the run rate pre-COVID was 85 million passengers on the platform. Maybe I'll stop there on the presentation if that's okay.
Great.
I chose to talk a bit about the business model initially, which I think is interesting to understand what's under the hood. Happy to take questions. Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you, Nico. Everyone listening in, you can type your questions in the chat or the Q&A sort of products on Zoom there. I think Björn has a question to kick off with.
Yeah, maybe we could start with the different mix of modalities. As of now, of course, as bus is fairly new to the business, carpooling is the vast majority in that mix. How do you see that more long-term? Will it be more of an even mix between the different modalities? What do you think?
It's clearly going to go with over time, the share of buses is going to increase. If you look at the pie chart I was showing at the beginning, that's been built in the last 12, 18 months essentially. It was zero 18 months ago on the platform. The BlaBlaBus business in Europe has been growing pretty fast. It's more capital intensive to grow or more operationally intensive to grow because you need to contract bus operators and set up lines and so on. Again, even though it's highly flexible and you don't pay for buses, it's still a more incremental job. The bus marketplace business was growing like over 100% year-on-year pre-COVID, and even now it's positive growth actually on a year-on-year basis, even during COVID.
That segment, I would say the non-European bus play, has the potential to be as big or bigger than carpooling in a pretty short time horizon of, I don't know, two to three years. It's a giant market. The thing to understand actually in, if you take markets again like Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, and then you can extend that to other markets where we operate, like Mexico, India to some extent. There is not much online distribution, actually. In a strange way, by creating our own asset with carpooling, we were the only player having 100% online distribution of trips. Today, in some of these markets, all of the markets, in fact, I named Ukraine, Russia and Brazil specifically, BlaBlaCar is a bigger online portal than any other bus online OTA, essentially.
When we start plugging buses, it becomes, I would say, much easier for us to fill up those buses with demand. We have much better economics in terms of CAC to LTV to a simple bus OTA. That's the play, I think in those countries, we can actually grab a disproportionate market share of the online distribution of buses, because it's nonexistent. If you look at competition, every time you have a few local companies, but it's not that big. That's part of the story, by the way, with Busfor. Busfor had done a phenomenal job on the supply side. They had built a great technology connecting, you're building that GDS layer, this IMS layer, connecting to this very fragmented world of operators. What we really bring in is we accelerate that because we were also working on that. We also brought in demand.
Suddenly, if we inject the BlaBlaCar demand on those thousands of operators that have been connected online, you tap into a market that's like, well, in Russia, it's like maybe $4 billion-$5 billion. Russia and Ukraine is maybe $4 billion-$5 billion of bus market, that's still 90% offline. Last but not least, I would say the bad story of COVID is less people travel right now. The good story of COVID in that sense is more and more people book online. Today, the reason we see still positive growth in markets like Russia and Ukraine, it's not because people travel more. It's because people book more online. Essentially, at least from what we see on the platform, the offline to online effect is greater than the temporary reduction of travel.
I'm very bullish actually on these markets because it's pretty rare that you have a large asset class, like buses in those markets, that have not migrated offline to online, and clearly it's bound to happen. We ended up with carpooling to build free demand traffic for exactly those trips, except people do it with carpooling on BlaBlaCar. As you add a volume of transport, of course, they take buses. Like in Brazil, that's the only way you can travel, essentially. There are no trains. When you start plugging buses onto BlaBlaCar, that's the same audience, essentially. You're just increasing your share of wallet on that audience. Long story short is, yes, I would anticipate that. It's hard to predict, but I would anticipate that within a few years, you see as many, if not more bus bookings, than carpool bookings.
The only slight caveat on that is as we integrate more supply onto the platform, it is interesting what is happening because we start to attract what I would call initially bus-only demand, or if you had train, it could be train-only demand. When they discover carpooling, actually, they switch and they use carpooling. In fact, actually, they tend to feed each other. The fact that you have more and more supply and you attract more demand onto the platform has the tendency to grow carpooling as well, actually. In terms, you have this sort of vicious cycle going on.
Thanks. A great answer. We have a question from the audience on the monetization and sort of monetizing new countries. You obviously generate new revenue without raising cost much.
Yeah.
Can you cover which countries now are strong and are monetizing now, and which ones are beginning to monetize or about to monetize, and then what's the threshold monetization in terms of scale or?
Yeah. There is no, I would say, good timing to start monetizing. In that sense, it's very much like a classified type play, where you spend several years essentially building your C2C marketplace, making sure essentially you are dominant as a C2C marketplace, and then over time you start monetizing. Today, we are monetizing most of Europe, so most of the key markets. I would say if you relate that to volume rather than countries, actually 70% of Europe is monetized. As of a few months ago, 0% outside of Europe was monetized. Even though we have more than half of the GMV outside of Europe.
The reason we haven't done that actually was the growth and the scale actually we were reaching without monetizing in most of this market was great, and it felt like essentially a better model to spend less marketing and not monetizing than monetizing early and spending more marketing. Essentially think of that as your no monetization is just a marketing tool to some extent to build dominance in those markets. We started to monetize Russia just literally a couple of months ago. The plan was to actually do that in April, but when it was technically ready in April, the country was shut down for transport. We are starting to monetize those markets outside of Europe, and that's going to be the story of the next 12, 18 months, essentially of between now and end of 2021, we will start monetizing most of that GMV.
Again, progressively in those countries. It gets pretty interesting because as you do that, you have a mechanical EBIT uplift because essentially in these markets, all the cost is already there. Essentially all the team, the marketing, the platform, all of that is already there. Essentially as we start monetizing, we have a massive EBIT uplift in those market that we can easily reinvest into, well, either other markets or interestingly, we are defining that playbook between how fast you grow bus versus how quickly you monetize carpooling. There is a nice multimodal equation to find between carpool monetization, how aggressive you want to be in buses and how you want to monetize the bus traffic. We're playing with that in Russia and there is a nice equilibrium that you can find where it's all about monetizing everything as fast as you can.
It's about finding the right equilibrium on monetizing carpool, monetizing buses, which are monetized from day one by the way in all the markets. You can tune the right equation of growth and monetization in those markets. That's what we getting into right now essentially as we speak we are deploying those models in Russia and after that we deploy that in Ukraine and Brazil.
Thanks. I think just on a follow-up on that revenue. I think we at VNV, we've put out there a long-term target that BlaBla should be able to generate EUR 5 per passenger or member per year. There's a question here on that and then do you think that's realistic?
Yeah, I think it is. Today it's higher than that in markets like France, right? If you look at the revenue gross margin per passenger in France it's much higher than five already, right? If you think of it in a single booking in France we tend to make EUR 3 on average in carpooling, even more actually, so it's between three and four. The ticket size in emerging market is lower so you tend to make more because the trips tend to be around EUR 10, even as you monetize you tend to take like one, EUR 1.50 per booking of gross margin which is more or less the same as revenue it's 80%, 90% gross margin in this model. As you add buses and you get more frequency you should be able I think in all these markets to get around the EUR 5 mark.
I would say globally yes it's very achievable I would say almost without multimodality but even more so as you get multimodal to get above EUR five average revenue per user per year on your active user base.
Great. There's many questions here. One is about the economics of connecting trains to the BlaBla platform or app.
It's a very good question. Essentially the commission you get or the take rate you get on train is pretty bad, right? As the thing to think about like you tend to take a few percent points that you get on trains. If you look at that standalone, you're aggregating trains and getting 2%, 3%, 4% take rate on train you need to sell a lot of trains to create a business when on carpool we take 22%, 23% actually take rate on something that's on average EUR 20. The reason it's interesting is A, it comes for free because if you take European markets essentially everyone takes the train so essentially it's something we're not offering the audience that they're booking anyway.
B, where it gets very interesting for us and the way we think of train is combining journeys so it's creating these unique experiences where you combine a train and a carpool. People do that because A, when we survey the user they tell us but we don't even need to survey user actually we know that 15%-20% of our meeting points in France are train stations which means people naturally combine those trips or they try to combine those trips. As you do so essentially we start selling, essentially we attract more demand on the platform because we have trains but mostly because they know they can find some unique combo of your train plus carpool and then you end up selling more carpooling on the back end or the front end of a train journey.
You think of that as if you go from Paris to, I don't know, Cassis in the French Riviera or some city like that, the best journey might be actually a high-speed rail going to Marseille and then a carpool for the last 100 or so kilometer. You'll never think of that on your own. The platform is going to find that for you with the smart stops and the machine learning on carpooling. By doing that, actually, that last segment is something where a driver could easily get EUR 15 or whatever, like EUR 20 on the last leg, and we take 25%. Most of the value is going to be created by what we call intermodal trips, where we combine train with other means of transport. Train standalone, at least in most European markets, is tricky.
Do you know what proportion roughly today is intermodal, where someone uses first a bus and then a carpool or a train or a carpool?
As I said, I have to check exactly the data, but it's around 15%-20% of BlaBlaCar journey actually originate or end at the train station. Assuming they don't live in the train station, they probably take a train or came from a train. What type of train journey? Is it just a short leg, a long leg? We don't have all this information. Today people naturally do that, but we're not creating even the opportunity to think of that, right? Whereas if you start combining with means of transport, again, I guess if you take a step back, it just makes sense. What do you see when you arrive at the train station? Cars. It's just full of cars. It's just like that's how people do the last part of the journey, essentially.
Combining the two makes a lot of sense. Combining bus and carpool would make sense. It's less logical because a bus is essentially slower than a car, so you don't have that speed element in the bus. I would say, we see people do that, but it's a lot less interesting than train. Again, going back to train, it's really about combining trips at the end. At the very basic level, while you grab that share of wallet from passengers on your platform, and you still make 3%, 4%, 5% depending on the operators on that GMV, which you will not take otherwise.
Are you monetizing BlaBlaLines, and has that sort of product line earned its raison d'être, or is it COVID-related? Can you talk about that?
Today we're growing that. BlaBlaLines is the, just to take a step back, it's the commuting app. It's carpooling for your regular daily journeys, so going from work to your home. BlaBlaLines was taking off extremely well, actually pre-COVID. Now it's restarting. It's coming back on. We don't do any marketing, it's something that's community-based. People just come back. It's pretty new, it's hard to look at year-on-year. If you look at year-on-year, they look good, but it was very tiny actually a year ago. It's restarting. It's a bit slower to restart than BlaBlaCar right now because I think you still have a lot of people working from home right now. It's still the main trend is not to go to work. In fact, I'm at the office today and I'm alone.
It's just like the empty office for me actually right now. Today we're focusing on France. It turns out that because of, and I won't get into all the details, but because of some regulations that passed actually last year in France, actually, you get a lot of subsidies from regions around short-distance carpooling. For us, the activity today is monetized by that. In France, it's actually a profitable standalone. It's pretty much break-even/profitable as it grows. That's kind of the beauty of it. It's not necessarily the model we deploy in every country, but it makes a fantastic playground where essentially we're being subsidized to create this great high-frequency product, and now we need to decide probably for next year to start launching that in another market. Then we need to define what's the monetization model of BlaBlaLines.
Before even talking about the monetization of Lines, the beauty of it, if you take a step back, is to say, if you get the tens of millions of users we have on BlaBlaCar to actually use a product not once a quarter or five, six times a year, which is roughly the frequency we see today for active users on BlaBlaCar, you get them to use a product four times a week. The frequency we see on BlaBlaCar is four times a week. We do roughly between 15 and 20 trips per month, actually, on Lines. You have fantastic engagement of the community. Even as a product, even if you were to only lightly monetize that usage, essentially you create an incredible captive audience, and then if you don't monetize those sort of repeat trips from home to work, you can actually monetize anything else.
Today what we see is that we have two type of audience on BlaBlaLines. One is the true carpoolers that really repeat the same pattern over and over again. Then we see passengers booking what we call the one-shot or a one-off trip actually on the BlaBlaLine journey. Essentially, your home to work, or a leg of your, or a portion, I should say, of your home to work might become a better Uber for someone else. That's super interesting because we realize that those sub-segment of BlaBlaLine journeys, you create a massive network of commuters. By doing so, actually, you just created a phenomenal network and some subset of this network becomes highly valuable as a short distance journey that you can highly monetize. We're playing with that in France, and we realize that part of these journeys are highly monetizable.
Some other journeys that you repeat all the time are less monetizable, but they create the massive frequency.
There is a follow-up question on that. That is the long-term idea to create a BlaBla super app where you add on other services. You've done a venture with Voi testing that, and payments and there's lot. Yeah, like a super app phenomenon.
I would say yes, and the super app is actually BlaBlaCar. We've been, in a sense that today that's where we aggregate buses. Even though we created an independent app for commuting so that we have the technical agility and the product agility to redefine a slightly different product paradigm for commuting. Actually, everything is built so that everything can be connected through API, and all the BlaBlaLine trips can and will, and we're already playing with that, will be connected to BlaBlaCar. Essentially, BlaBlaLine is really going to focus itself on the repeat use case of commuting, which is mostly monetized today through all kind of government schemes. There are some very strong one in France, but not only. There are many markets actually subsidizing some of that or helping some of that because they see that as public transport.
It's really like a substitute to public transport, in a way. Essentially, if you connect all these trips to BlaBlaCar, you have more of a, I would say, one-off demand that would see those trips as, hey, it's a fantastic 40-kilometer journey or whatever to go from X suburb to the city center or whatnot. The willingness to pay for this one-off journey is extremely high. Essentially, BlaBlaCar is built to receive every third party, today trains and buses from all these emerging markets, including BlaBlaLines. We see that at some point it's going to become another supply feeder onto BlaBlaCar. Yes, we've been experimenting with Voi, that's the same idea. That's very experimental with Voi because the booking model of e-scooter is very different from what we do traditionally.
Whenever it's something you pre-book slightly in advance, you can put that on the BlaBlaCar platform. We're rebuilding. That's part of my introduction, I guess. We went from a carpooling community to building around that community, like a much larger GDS and OTA layer when you can connect actually all type of supply.
Great. I know we started a little late, hopefully we have time for maybe one more question. I think there are several questions around geographical expansion beyond the countries you are today, and especially with an emphasis on China and why we're not there. Maybe the U.S. also. Most importantly, why you're not in Sweden.
Broad answer on that. We had a big phase of geo expansion where we went from essentially one to 22 countries between 2012 and essentially 2016. As you can tell from the presentation and the discussion, the focus right now is mostly on product expansion and building that multimodal play. I would say we want to demonstrate that at scale in several markets. Some in Europe and in France is obviously a great playground for us, but also Russia, Ukraine, Brazil. I think once we have that, it would make tons of sense, actually, to go back. I don't know if it's a year down the road or two, but hopefully it's not five or 10. You have this new playbook of, okay, you can enter a market with carpooling plus buses.
Yes, you would think of Asia, you would think about the rest of LATAM, you would think about some countries in Africa. After that, specifically on the two giants there, or the three giants there, Sweden, China and the U.S. In terms of big markets, China, we never really looked at China. I'd love to get some intelligence on that, but it feels pretty hard to create a business like that in China when you looked at how the likes of Uber and many other pure C2C or B2C marketplaces have struggled existing in China. To some extent, DiDi is doing or was trying to do more or less what we do. It feels the competitive landscape in China is a bit scary, right?
The amount of effort and capital you need to put to exist in China, it feels like today at our scale, probably an unreasonable risk. It doesn't mean there is no market. There is probably a market. It feels pretty hard for us to crack. I think we demonstrated there are lots of other larger markets where we can build BlaBlaCar and the bus marketplace business with a lot less competition. U.S. is different in the sense that the model of carpooling as we do it has never taken off. I mean, for all kind of reasons, ranging from cost of motoring is very low.
The car insurance framework is complex and essentially if you take a passenger that pays for a journey, even if you not make a profit, you could have some issue if you have an insurance, which you're a lot less protected than in most European countries. Last but not least, there is no good public transport. It means finding the right, or I should say the level of liquidity you would need in the marketplace so that your pickup and drop-off point are relevant for users because they cannot take a tube or a tram or anything to get to the meeting point would be enormous. It's been tried. A company like Lyft actually started as Zimride, which was the BlaBlaCar of the U.S.
I have always talked to John and Logan, actually the founders of Lyft and again, before that Zimride, and that was the analysis as well, that it was really tricky to crack the liquidity problem in a country like the U.S. where you have no first mile and last mile solution without a car, because you ask the drivers to become taxi driver, and it's really tricky in that model. Today, I guess we've been proven right to some extent not to go there, I mean, because no one has done it. I think it's hard to crack still today as a market. There might be an opportunity in the Northeast area where I think the density and probably makes more sense. Maybe we do that one day.
I would say right now it's not top of the list in terms of things to do for the next couple of years.
Great. Well, thank you. I think we have lots of other questions, I think we've taken so much of your time and thank you for being so generous with it and answering.
Thank you.
candidly on all these questions. With the questions that we haven't answered, we'll try to follow up ourselves with that. Everyone, thank you so much. Nico, especially, a big thanks to you.
Thank you.
Enjoy.
Thanks. Bye.
Bye.