- There are huge discounts on purchasing 4 seats
From @glebm
I'm thinking that we could take the money upfront when you join a departure (datetime, from station, to station) The hold gets charged to a group of 4 when the group 4 if full, and the user receives a confirmation email (i18n en, es, etc. would be great) If the group is not full at N hours before departure, the money is returned, and the user is notified
We would need to get data from renfe (no api) for schedule and ticket availability Would need to have an SEO budget of a few thousand to fill it up quickly
It's Spain though, though it's probably not allowed by their terms and conditions to be scraped. Hopefully there is some data freedom act in the EU to get around this
It looks something similar already exists: http://www.carpling.com/es/train/compartir-tarifa-mesa-renfe/
It has 1500 likes on facebook, the oldest tweet on carpling is from 5 Jul 2012 (10 days ago)
Renfe tried to do a facebook page on that, but failed http://renfeblog.com/2011/11/04/organiza-tu-propia-mesa-y-comparte-tu-oferta/