Travelling in Denmark with GoMore

I was on vacation in Denmark recently, staying about an hour outside of Copenhagen. A good friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a couple years lives in Odense. While Denmark has a fantastic public transport system, the train trip is reasonably expensive: if I had a purchased a standard adult ticket in advance, it would have cost 276 DKK (~$40*). Instead my friend recommended GoMore.

At its core, GoMore is a ridesharing platform. When somebody wants to drive between two cities, they put up the date, time, where they are leaving from, and the price. As a rider, the website lets you search for the trip and the date, and then shows you the results. It also shows you if someone is travelling through the two cities as part of a longer trip. If you aren't going the entire way, you can suggest a lower price to the driver. The company deals with the trust issue in two ways. First, they strongly encourage you to login with Facebook. It doesn't ask for any strange permissions like the ability to post for you. Second, you have to use a real mobile number and verify it before you can offer or book seats.

The cell number was the only problem I ran into throughout the trip. They make you select between 11 country codes (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Poland). Since you can't book a seat without verifying your number, I had to put in my friend's number and she sent me the code. When I booked the seat, I just went ahead and put my US number in the comments.

As you can see in the photo above, some people have little badges next to their photos. That means they have a 5 star rating. Really though, that doesn't mean much because they might have only 2 reviews. The guy I chose had only 4 stars, but he had six 5-star reviews, and one 1-star review. By the time we left, he was up to 5-stars as people from his last trip had finally rated him. He drove an old ford fiesta, and for 150 DKK (~$22*) the trip was very easy and simple. We left within 10 minutes of the meeting time (had to wait for one guy whose train arrived late at the station). The air conditioning didn't work on a 28 C day which was rough, but most people don't bother to fix their car air conditioning in Denmark since you need it so rarely.

Overall, I saved 126 DKK (~$18), saved half an hour (the train was delayed at Roskilde Station since everybody was going home from Roskilde Festival), and didn't have to deal with buying a ticket at the station. In the States, I would have loved to be able to make up some of the cost of my drives back and forth between Philadelphia and D.C.. Unfortunately, the US is not nearly as trusting as Scandinavia, and even with Facebook I would probably be uncomfortable with strangers in my car. Also, while I have no idea how the tax situation works in Denmark, I can only imagine that the IRS wouldn't look too fondly on this situation. Sure, there are some services like Uber or Lyft, but GoMore is really only meant for people who are driving places anyway. Given how easy it was to use GoMore, you can only hope that one day something like it will make its way across the Atlantic.

*All currency conversions from July 14th, 2015.