Comments on: What I Hate About Booking Travel Online

By: Michael Cameron

Michael Cameron — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:34:38 +0000

Hi Scott / Peter – We are about to launch a new door-to-door travel search engine that addresses this exact problem:
http://www.rome2rio.com/

It’s a bit like zoombu, but has a more global focus, is faster and uses a google-maps interface. The focus so far has been on combining search of flights, inter-city trains, ferries and driving directions but we plan to expand to include local transport, buses, etc. in the future.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 05:50:46 +0000

something similar to this in Melbourne – but for global travel, it is a good idea.

By: Peter Tegelaar

Peter Tegelaar — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:09:49 +0000

@Ben thanks for the Zoombu link! Have just registered for their service, can’t wait to try it out.

By: Ben Godfrey

Ben Godfrey — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:48:07 +0000

Zoombu aims to provide just the experience you desire. They were a SeedCamp finalist, but they're still in development.

By: Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:30:14 +0000

Interestingly with public transit, in the US several major cities work with Google Maps. I noticed that in both in Houston and San Francisco / Silicon Valley. That may have been part of what set me thinking that having generalized transportation on a similar model could be nice.

By: Peter Tegelaar

Peter Tegelaar — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:20:22 +0000

Ha, your annoyances sound very familiar! Especially the hard-to-find flexibility in departure/arrival times and the hidden costs (both the extra charges related to your flight and getting from and to the airport).

Had a related idea restricted to public transport when I was in Berlin last week. You know perfectly well how to use your publics route planner in your own city/country, but most of the time you’re extremely inefficient in a new one. It doesn’t help if the route planner is in a different language either. In any case, you still have to find the appropriate route planner in the first place!

So it would be great if you could enter start and end points/addresses. Then the application would access the publics route planner for that city/country, and feed you back the route. Nice and easy.