We were lucky to catch up with Tim Van den Thillart recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tim, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

As a Financial Controller for international NGOs I flew a lot. I was a lot on airplanes to sometimes hard to reach locations and I loved it. I loved connecting with my colleagues from all over the world and I was stoked everytime I would see different places. But gradually I felt less and less comfortable sharing that I was on so many airplanes as I also started to feel bad myself a bit about my carbon footprint. My work, and especially the part of it I liked so much was having a big negative impact on the environment. So, I asked myself the question whether I found the pros of this work outweighed the negative impact on climate.

I concluded that the positive sides of the work justified the flying to these faraway places. Yet, once I was waiting at Frankfurt Airport for my last flight back home to Amsterdam, I realised I could as well have taken the train for the last leg. If I’d had to be just in Frankfurt, I would have never taken a plane. It’s a no brainer to go by train if you need to travel between the two cities. But now that the flight was part of a longer journey I found myself waiting for a plane. This moment was pivotal for me.

That day, I realised that I could travel smarter carbon-wise and hence I made a resolution: whenever I decide to fly, I do it in the most sustainable way. That meant that I would avoid short flights at all – even if they’re part of a longer journey. I would choose a direct flight from Amsterdam if there was one, and if there wasn’t, I would look for a direct flight from an alternative airport that could be reached by high-speed train (in fact, in and around the Netherlands, there are quite some airports very well connected to the high-speed train network). This way I could avoid ALL short flights.

Living in Amsterdam meant that I could take some direct flights from Amsterdam and if there weren’t I would jump on a train to the airports of Brussels, Paris, or Frankfurt. These are exactly the cities I would visit by train anyway, but now I started doing the same if I had to be on their airports instead of in their city centres.

I did this for a while and I absolutely loved it as I found spending the first and last leg of my trip on a train way more comfortable than boarding a plane: it’s more spacious and the train is a way better place to work than an airplane because there’s no queueing, no ascend and descend, and because of the availability of electricity sockets and internet.

My colleagues admired what I did and they wanted to do the same, but they ran into three practicle problems. The first one was that they didn’t know flight schedules and the train network as well as I did. They didn’t know where and what to search for. The second issue they faced was that if they knew of a certain route they had to combine train and flight schedules and this is very time consuming as information is scattered. I saw fun in doing it, but I understood not everybody loves that as much as I did. And the last challenge was that when they had found it, they had to convince the travel manager within the NGO to book that trip – in fact booking the train and plane ticket separately.

I saw how difficult it was for my colleagues to follow my example and I saw the hurdles that were there for the travel manager. At first I was amazed that it was so difficult and that there was no party that had actually combined trains and planes. I dreamt of a search engine that would treat high-speed trains as interchangeable with flights. When having assured myself there is really no party in the market doing this, I decided to set up a company. The idea is actually very straightforward: combing train schedules with flight schedules with a few rules that make the output a more sustainable alternative than traditional search results. I envisioned we would always show only the options that I would take myself. This way we would serve the customer by curating the search results.

I really hope that many people start replacing all their short flights by train journeys. I dream of a drastic cut in the number of short flights and that this also boosts the development and use of the high-speed rail network.

Tim, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

The reason I set up my business was basically just because I was amazed it didn’t exist yet and I thought it should exist. I am a frequent traveller myself and I always want things to be done in the most efficient way. I see beauty in doing things the way as we would jointly agree on if we had to set them up from scratch. That means that I enjoy taking a bike when moving within a city or a metro for longer distances in bigger cities.

Train and plane markets have evolved separately (one with a focus on domestic and the other one with a focus on international) and the flight industry developed into a hub-and-spoke model with a lot of unnecessary short flights – called feeder flights. Well, these are necessary for the airlines to fill their more profitable long-haul flights, but if we were to set up everything from scratch with our current climate challenges, we would integrate train and planes much more as trains make sense for shorter distances and planes for long ones. In fact, we see this happening with designs of new airports. Long-haul flights can actually be filled by travellers coming in by train.

Yet, the situation is as it is now and with that in mind, I think we can do even much better with the current infrastructure. The only thing that we need to do is combining information and making conscious choices. bookachoo combines that information and with that we enable travellers to take conscious decisions on their travel mode.

I am not only passionate about replacing short flights by train journeys as they avoid a ton of (carbon) emissions on a specific journey, but there’s also a network effect: it boosts the use and thus also the network of high-speed trains. The more people take trains, the higher the frequency, the better the service and the more extensive the network and services get. This way also travellers that never go long distances benefit from this change.

I am proud that our product really differs from what others in the market offer. We offer a curated set of travel options that our customers can trust: we did the selection as we think that it’s no longer justifiable to let price be the only driver. We think that there is a balance between a reasonable travel option in terms of time and its impact on the environment. We show those balanced results.

To conclude I’m proud that we do not say one should never fly again. We know that there is still a need to travel far (sometimes) and we think that people should decide for themselves if they should travel or not. Taken that into account, we say: if you have decided you will travel far, have a look at what we offer to see you can do it quite a bit more sustainably (and contribute to decreasing the popularity of certain short-haul routes).

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

When I had the idea of setting up this search and book engine I realised I couldn’t do it on my own. First I teamed up with strategic co-founder Jasper Mutsaerts. I met him in Tallinn at an event called Mindvalley University. That event had created an app which used AI to introduce you to three new relevant people each day. One day I saw this guy wearing a very colourful shirt in the app as a suggestion. On one of the parties I walked towards him as he was wearing this very shirt and we connected immediately. I shared my idea and he shared his background. We were both enthusiastic and although I didn’t have a CTO by then it felt good to team up.

Then I had to find a CTO. I realised that finding the best CTO is key for this company to succeed as it is a highly technical product and the CTO is the one that sets it up first, but is also the one that will build the most important team within bookachoo.

So, I wanted to take the time and do good research on the best fit. I asked around in my network and I recorded a clip on Brussels-Midi train station in front of some high speed trains in which I explained the idea and what we were looking for. This clip got big exposure on LinkedIn and from the replies I selected 10 possible candidates which I interviewed. There were multiple very skillful candidates with which I had a good ‘click’, but one stood out and we’ve been working together for over a year now.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

There’s one person that has influenced me quite a bit. His name is Eric Edmeades. First I took his course ‘Business Freedom Blueprint’. In that course he teaches how to properly set up your company so that you can actually handover work and get Business Freedom. Although in this stage, I’m not after that, not after taking long holidays, but it has helped me think in a different way at almost all things you have to design for the first time as a founder.

Next to that, Eric Edmeades is a world class public speaker and as I had liked his course and then saw him speak, I decided I wanted to learn more from him. So, I went to his Speaking Academy and that has helped me as a public speaker, but basically in every conversation I’ve had since then. bookachoo benefits from that too as I am better at interviews, better at story writing and a better conversationalist.

Contact Info:

• Website: bookachoo.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-van-den-thillart/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tvandenthillart