booking callisthenics – sounds awfully familiar. “ready to leave at hh:mm earliest, need to be there by then. can leave no earlier than that, and please get me a stopover there on the way home, thank you very much”. That’s called a “travel agent” 😉 and until our controllers killed the company contract with Carlson Wagonlit and made us DYI it they charged about 20 EUR for getting me just that answer, and usally cheaper and more reliable than any of those steenkin’ portals. I guess said controllers are quite happy that the time we spend booking is not recorded, or else they would have been controlled away long ago together with their smart ideas and fancy suits.
My recommendation – go oldschool. Find a nice little travel agency near you, and get them used to accepting that kind of input, my local “Reisebüro” became quite adept at it and they charge a surprisingly acceptable fee on top of the ticket itself, I guess it’s the ticket commission that allows them to do that. And they might even like a change in between all those Fuertaventura there-and-back-again-with-a-headache tickets
Florenz
]]>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.
]]>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.
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