The portal aims at providing users with door-to-door journey planning, with comparison of transport modes such as flight, train, bus, private car, taxi, ferry, bike and walking.

The site will provide time, cost and carbon footprint of each journey option.

Initially the site focuses on domestic trips in France, with the plan to expand to other markets later on. Flight, trains, hotels and packages are provided by Lastminute.com and Go Voyages, while the car rental partner is National Citer.

Unlike classic metasearch engines, flights are paid and booked directly within the site in a dynamic packaging model. The technology is provided by Advences, a leading French travel technology company already powering Go Voyage and other local OTAs.

With self-drive car options the user can print or export the full itinerary, purchase additional GPS maps, or download updated speed camera location lists.

“En passant”, Citroen also offers car maintenance contracts. This might be the actual driver behind this launch, but the overall quality of the site clearly provides much more than just a shell for car maintenance services.

The marketing launch is well coordinated with:

• Abundant pre-release PR buzz
• An iPhone app mainly focused on urban home delivery rental car service “Call Car”
• A Twitter account

It remains to see if Citroen is going to invest seriously in building traffic, knowing the very competitive situation in online travel marketing, among OTAs, comparators, metas, travel deals and media sites of all kinds.

Several companies are active in the door-to-door trip planning space: Travelfusion (owner of patent on multimodal journey planning), Zoombu (currently disabled following its recent sale to Skyscanner), Swiss based Routerank and the upcoming Kiwirama.

Here is a clip:

The acquisition will see Zoombu founders Rachel Armitage and Alistair Hann move to the Edinburgh-based Skyscanner for what are being called senior technical and marketing roles within the company. Another member of the Zoombu team is also expected to move to Scotland.

As well as the well-respected Armitage and Hann, perhaps even more importantly Skyscanner gets its hands on technology which will allow it to become a fully functioning, multi-modal travel search engine, covering rail, bus and city transportation to combine with its existing flights product.

Zoombu was created in 2008 but was limited to a private beta test for much of its early, opening up with a micro version targeting European ski destinations in January 2010 and the full site three months later.

The site’s core proposition is that a user can enter a postcode within the “From” and “To” fields for a search query and obtain results, door-to-door, covering every mode of transport.

It also lists results based on the cheapest, quickest and greenest options – the latter becoming an important comparison when it comes to adding rail into metasearch engines.

Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams says the rail element of the Zoombu technology will be integrated into the main Skyscanner site over the course of the next few months, with buses and city transportation expected some time in the future.

“The goal is take the best bits of what Zoombu is doing, add more caching to make it faster and then integrate with Skyscanner over time,” Williams adds.

The acquisition appears to have come at a critical point for both companies – Skyscanner wanting to expand into multi-modal search and Zoombu reaching a moment where the product and technology “was extremely good” but needed help to grow.

Williams says the existing Zoombu consumer-facing site will not see any further development, except perhaps as a test area for new functionality in the future.

Zoombu, which had attracted a six-figure round of investment from the Said Business School in Oxford in late-2009, started to bring in some revenue but had not reached profitability, Williams confirms.

Skyscanner could have eventually worked on its own door-to-door search technology, Williams believes, but the acquisition meant Armitage and Hann could join the team and developers could continue to work on the existing flight search functionality (“lots of work to do on flights, but we can’t wait forever to do rail”).

Armitage says: “They [Skyscanner] are a company we’ve always been impressed with and it’s an exciting next step for multimodal search and a great home for the tech we’ve built.”

Meanwhile, Williams says the company has been watching developments closely across the Atlantic Ocean in recent months, especially with Kayak laying down plans to list on the public markets.

The earliest Skyscanner would consider following suit would be 2013, he explains.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Movolo provides a door-to-door search and booking tool, enabling travelers to quickly shortlist and calculate all possible routes by air, land, rail and sea with only one itinerary search.

Any city or even point of interest can be inputted or selected on maps in the proprietary search engine.

Movolo’s leadership is headed by a proven management team:

• Mauro Montanaro, CEO, former-CEO of Fox Mobile and VP Sales Nokia, Asia Pacific
• Andrea Risa, co-founder and charged with Movolo’s sales, marketing and business development.
• Vadims Ilovaiskis, chief financial officer.
• Alberto Genovese, head of online marketing, SEO and partnerships.
• Francesco G Canalis, CTO.
• Gilles Karle, former CTO of Terminal A.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Movolo has been seed funded by founders and two angels. First round was funded by current management team.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Still users need to visit an average of five websites before finding and buying their tickets. We want to make sure they will need to visit only one website, making online travel simple.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Movolo delivers a simple process of locating, selecting and booking door-to-door trips. Currently full international flights combinations (both low costs and traditional) and high speed trains for the Italian market are available for searching and booking directly from Movolo website.

We are totally independent and ads free. Users pay us a small fee only when booking.

We are able to provide unique travel solutions combining low cost with traditional airlines and other means of transport. An example of search on Movolo would be: Leeds to Coliseum and would offer you as results eventually several combinations of low cost flights making you save hundreds of Euros compared to other OTA’s.

Moreover it tells you how to reach the Coliseum from the chosen Airport.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We are currently marketing the website movolo.it, although an international version is available on Movolo. Therefore our key customers are Italian passengers.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, we had an extensive beta test period between the summer and now involving hundreds of customers, and we are and will continuously test the robustness of the system and its features

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Movolo will have diversified streams of revenue derived from booking fees for online sales proportional to the complexity and uniqueness of the search; commissions from global distribution systems and airlines referral programs; commissions from non-air partners like hotels, car rental agencies and insurances.

To base our international team in Latvia helps us to keep our costs low.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Movolo understands its customers’ pain points, and set out to solve specific problems related to travel. Movolo is 100% unique in the following areas: Booking travel from cities with airport(s) to cities without an airport; from cities without an airport to cities without an airport or to points-of- interest; Trains and Buses integrated in one search and one booking; Hotel booking and car rental: Unique 100% relevance based on exact location; as well as booking traditional and low-cost flights on the same itinerary.

Weaknesses:

• Movolo does not have a global presence and does not offer its website services in any location other than Italy for the time being, though there are plans on opening up Western Europe in the upcoming year.

Opportunities:

• International demand for door-to-door flight service and transfers is high.

Threats:

• Movolo is 100% competitive with its strongest competitor(s) on any routes. On the traditional direct major airport to airport volume routes we are at par. As we do not have volume deals with airlines we might be less competitive than some competitors on specific routes. The key threat is timing and communication: we know we have something unique and we have a good advantage over competitors but we need to roll it out soon.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Some potential investors told us that technically what we are doing is too difficult to achieve (one said 50 times Google search complexity) and that we should provide the same off-the-shelf services as everyone else. Someone else said consumers will not buy online trains, buses and ferry tickets.

Others claimed that we would not be able to create a world class, innovative service out of Latvia.

We proved with our Italian and .com site we are able to meet our promise and vision of door to door travel already.

Moreover with large investments in high speed railways and emerging green travel conscience especially in Europe we believe consumers want to check also other alternatives to flights at least for <1,000km routes.

Moreover we think there is a desperate need for the online travel buyer to find all the possible itineraries and best prices in one website, and we want to meet their expectations and beat them.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

• Successful launch in three more countries.
• Full optimization of flights algorithms and integration of European high speed trains, buses and ferries.
• Be in the top seven OTAs in selected countries.
• Higher than Euro average profitability share from non-air products.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

I am a sucker for a new way to do online travel search.

In a recent post - Four types of non-destination based search and what it means for online travel – I thought I had captured the new ways to do search and discovery online.

After a conversation recently with Rachel Armitage co-founder and director of UK startup Zoombu, I discovered a new type of search: the complete end-to-end trip search.

[Tnooz's first post on Zoombu]

What is Zoombu?

Zoombu’s shout above the noise of online travel search is that they provide a door-to-door vision of a trip from origin to destination, including all options – taxi, metro, shuttle bus, car hire, trains, ferry, flights with integrated timetables and pricing.

Armitage calls it “multimodal door-to-door search”.  This means a consumer can get a view of all of the different choices in getting from A to B and as well as the full cost.

I carried out a test run search on for a trip from Oxford, England to Reims in the Champagne region of France. Here are three of the results

By ferry:

For a car-ferry across the English Channel-car journey thje cost is £219 and takes about 11 hours

By train:

Taking trains all the way is more expensive (£253) and has more connections, but only takes seven or so hours

By plane:

Flying is somewhere inbetween, costing £227 but takes around the same time as the ferry (10.5 hours).

In this case taking the train is the winner (assuming I don’t want/need to have my car with me).

For more refinement I can order search by time, cost and – if the Greenie in me dominates – by carbon footprint.

Zoombu is the first place I have seen this. The ability to compare cost, timing and connections using different modes of transport.

In the past, consumers have had to figure out all of the in betweens and connections for themselves.

OTAs have been offering transfers for years but have not integrated it into a full travel time line search result.

Metasearch sites have been connecting inventory that might not be available on OTAs (such as some LCCs) but they have not been showing non-air options (ferry, train).

Where did they come from?

Zoombu is a classic European start-up.  Armitage and co-founder Alistair Hann are artificial intelligence academics that raised attention through winning an Oxford seedcamp competition.

In Dec 2009 the comany raised a funding round from the Saïd Business School Venture Fund. This has provided Zoombu with runway “well through to the end of 2010 and beyond”, according to Armitage.

Zoombu’s six full time staff are focusing their energies on the dual challenge of building the engine and access timetable and fare information.

Armitage says the team are employing “multiple different integration for the different modes of transport”.

Some integration is through aggregators, some is direct and on occasion she and the team have had to go down to a individual timetable level for a single airport shuttle bus timetable (ie Hahn airport shuttle).  Revenue model is affiliate commissions (ie CPA) but is only able to monetise part of the clicks as very few local travel options have affiliate programs.

Challenges

Great start for Zoombu. They have a product that is almost unique (Travelfusion is heading down the same path) and funding to push it out. But that won’t be enough to make it.

Armitage and I talked through five challenges for the company and this type of search product:

• Speed: Getting the results fast. Kayak CEO Steve Hafner has spoken many times of his obsession with speed of  search results.  Armitage and Zoombu need to be similarly obsessed.  The Zoombu challenge is that they have more data sources to search in one go than anyone else in online travel. In my Oxford to Reims example Zoombu needs to query at least twenty different sources.  The full results took almost 50 seconds.  Armitage is aware of this saying they are working on both caching and latency solutions to speed up results and “ways to keep the user interested while waiting” to reduce user frustration.
• Distribution: Getting the customers to visit the site.  Marketing costs in online travel are out of control.  The battle in search for buying clicks, on meta and research site for referrals and on established sites for customers is out of control.  Zoombu is joining a ferocious take no prisoners battle for eyeballs.  Armitage is also aware of this too – admitting that it is “very hard to build a brand on popular [search] terms such as ‘cheap flights’“.  She says the Zoombu plan to target natural search in the long tail, betting on the increasing volume of search traffic around how to get from point A to point B. She is also planning to make a significant push into affiliate sales but via supporting the incredibly large number of independent properties across Europe that would benefit from a “how to get to us” link on their site.  The affiliate push is now a common story among search innovators.
• Accuracy and reliance: Getting the data right all the time. The most complex result of my Reims example has more than 10 components.  The risk for Zoombu is that in this search and searches like it that one of the links in the chain is wrong and disrupts (or even kills) the whole trip.  Customers will not be forgiving.
• Coverage:  Getting the destinations loaded. Not as critical as the first three challenges but Armitage and Zoombu are planning further expansion in destinations. Currently strong in UK, France and Spain.  Looking to move further across Europe and beyond.
• Booking and tracking: Getting the booking process to be as easy as the search process.  Currently bookings are done click by click with each of the individual providers.   The future potential here is to link to a TripIt or Traxo like functionality for at least storing the whole trip in one place, maybe even booking it all in one place.

My Take

This product excites me.  The ability to see all of options for Euro travel is a breakthrough in online travel.  It opens up online travel to non-capital/big city destinations in a way I have not seen before.  But there are five challenges for Zoombu to meet to make it a success, and three of them are big ones (speed, accuracy and distribution).

Have a play with Zoombu and let me know your thoughts.