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.

Fledgling metasearch engine Zoombu, which has been in private beta for months, has drawn back the curtains to finally reveal its product to the wider world.

The London, UK-based company has spent the best part of the last 18 months developing the system, securing funding and launching spin-off models – ZoombuSki – to test functionality.

The main principles behind the business, which is the brainchild of co-founders Rachel Armitage and Alistair Hann, are travel search using point-to-point (zip/postcodes) and the way results are presented.

Users can get results based on the quickest, cheapest or greenest options using a variety of methods of transport, including air, rail and taxi.

The site is currently limited to European destinations but Zoombu says it has plans to extend to North America at some point in the future.

Oxford, UK-based meta site Zoombu is almost ready to reveal all to the wider world with the launch of an overhauled micro-version of the main site for skiiers.

Under wraps for over a year – during which time it has still managed to win plenty of plaudits and a round of funding – Zoombu will unveil a slimmed down version of the main site next week to target the late-ski market in Europe.

The main Zoombu site, which features the same design treatments as those applied to the ski edition, is scheduled to be unveiled at a later date, although data and feedback from those using the ski site effectively as a testbed will be incorporated into the wider development work.

The ski site allows users to look for travel options between the UK and the French Alps using different modes of transport and using point-to-point search, rather than departure and destination airports.

Results are filtered using quickest, cheapest and greenest options.

Google Maps are also included to show where on the user’s journey their modes of transport will change.

Co-founder Rachel Armitage says:

“It’s a very small part of our overall coverage, but we have decided to open this up so that users can easily try it out and provide valuable feedback on the functionality, which will be reflected in the main product.”

Another UK-based web startup, Snowcarbon, launched in October 2009 to provide information and deals for skiiers heading to the Alps by rail.

Fresh from launching a service to allow users to get detailed search results based on their physical location instead of just nearest airport, Travelfusion has also integrated a mapping device.

The UK-based consumer-facing and B2B metasearch engine now allows users to select any location on a Google map for the From and To fields of a trip.

The map automatically works out the postcodes/zipcodes and then returns results based on the point-to-point parameters.

The system also allows users to use maps to view airports within their region (All London, for example) and obtain results for individual departure points.

The TravelFusion system is now moving quickly to position itself ahead of the Zoombu project from Oxford, UK.

Zoombu recently finalised a round of funding but is still in closed beta and unlikely to have the same spread of destinations and departure points as TravelFusion has launched within its point-to-point product.

Startup metasearch site Zoombu has finalised a six-figure funding round courtesy of an Oxford, UK-based investment group.

The company won a competition run the Saïd Business School Venture Fund in May this year to share a funding pot to tune of £1 million alongside health startup Altitude Medical.

Zoombu says the investment, which is undisclosed in full but a six-figure sum, will be put to expanding the small team and quickening its product pipeline.

The fledgling site has attracted wide praise for its concept despite still remaining behind a private beta wall for almost one year.

Zoombu connects users between specific points and metasearches prices and time based on other forms of transport alongside traditional flight product such as taxi and public subways.

Fellow UK site Travelfusion is also gearing up to launch a point-to-point metasearch function into its widely used consumer and B2B engine.

Zoombu currently only serves locations and products in the UK and France. It has plans to broaden its European coverage in 2010 and perhaps North America later in the same year.

Metasearch is finally climbing into what could be an exciting second phase with news that TravelFusion is developing new functionality to allow full travel plan searches.

The UK-based firm will launch an overhauled version of its consumer-facing website in early-2010 to include point-to-point metasearch featuring a breakdown of time and prices of transportation to and from the main departure and arrival points of a trip.

The functionality is similar to the widely praised, closed-beta only Zoombu metasearch engine, which also has point-to-point search capability.

The TravelFusion system allows users to add post and zip codes in the To and From fields and then returns additional results including taxi or local metro fares and the time required.

Users will also be shown a check-in time for airport departures.

The development for TravelFusion, which has a sizeable B2B business as well as its consumer portal, comes as metasearch hits what some say is an important development period in its history.

The enthusiasm for alert and prediction technology in meta engines such as Bing and Farecompare in the US is expected to reach Europe during 2010 and a number of new entrants, such as Cheapflights, are expected to enter the market over the same period.