The transportation service across the country is quite underserved nowadays in Romania. Taking buses is time and nerve consuming since roads are bad and crowded; besides Romanians have not a very good rep when it comes to safe driving. Travelling by trains is  cheap and decent (at times) with the fast ones, yet, even with those, slow for long distances due to poor conditions of the railroad tracks. Travelling by airplanes is quite expensive. As such, I think that there is a lot of money left on the table because the market is not targeted in a segmented way, perhaps for the investors' belief of Romanians low buying power. It is obvious that a low cost airline carrier such as Irish Ryan Air or US Southwest Airlines would challenge the present industry landscape. At the same time, there is an increasing segment of business people who need to travel across Romania, and the distances may become an issue. If not only at the national level, serving the regional one might be more attractive. For people not familiar with Romania's size or distances, the country is the second largest (235,000 sqm) in Central Eastern Europe after Poland and totals some 21m souls.

In this context there was little surprise this weekend when I read about the German VCs from Adval Capital Management which just lanched two ventures (plane rental and limo rental) that appear to target the high end of the business community market. Those businesses are clearly complementing each other and my guess is that the initial idea implied the jet rental only, as currently there's too few local companies providing this kind of service. The car rental involves luxury ones because of the target business people who would be renting a jet. Smart move, though not a first mover on the local level, but competition is heating up. I am convinced that it is a matter of time until the low cost end would see increased competition as well. To my knowledge, presently there is only one company of this kind, web-based and servicing Romania-Italy routes.