Not so for multi-modal travel search startup Rome2Rio [TLabs Showcase - Rome2Rio], which has this week introduced a carbon scheme with Offset Options that shows the environmental options for a trip as well tries to persuade travellers to purchase offsets.

When a user carries out a search the amount of CO2 created is displayed. This works for each leg of the journey and includes each mode of transport such as road, rail and air.

If a user switches a mode of transport, or additional elements are added (stopovers, etc), then the CO2 is recalculated.

Once the user clicks on the emissions total they will be given a pop up listing the total amount for the journey and a showcase of projects the user can choose to donate to, using a calculation of the amount of carbon to be offset and the value of the schemes.

The challenge for the scheme will be getting the user to head back to the site to make the offset purchase, as Rome2Rio is a metasearch engine and sends visitors off to the supplier or OTA site to secure the booking.

A string of travel companies have introduced carbon offsetting schemes over the years, including Expedia and Lastminute.com in Europe.

Fellow multi-modal travel search service Zoombu (before it disappeared into the depths of Skyscanner) started out with a environmental option, displaying the cheapest, quickest and greenest results for point-to-point trips.

Rail fares from on key routes across the continent are now included within search results for users in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

For example, a London to Edinburgh search will bring back details from East Coast mainline services within the original flight search results.

TripAdvisor is working with a number of providers to get the data, including RailEasy for UK fares, and RailEurope and Deutsche Bahn for other European operators.

Similar to the flight metasearch, users are sent off to the provider’s website for the booking.

TripAdvisor claims it is the first metasearch engine to integrate full rail international networks into a single system, although this is a service that has actually been provided by a number of metasearch engines, such as TravelFusion and Zoombu (before being bought by Skyscanner), for quite a while, albeit in local markets.

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.

Developers, startups and the curious are invited to take part in the first THack, on this occasion a two-part initiative aimed at bringing together folk from the around the travel and tech industries to come up with fresh ideas for products, tools or widgets using different APIs, some openly available and others via specially arranged access for THack.

THack London will be split into two parts:

The first element will take place on the afternoon of Thursday 27 January at TechHub in London, hosted by Expedia UK. Those attending will share ideas, learn more about the APIs available and, most importantly, have a great opportunity to meet fellow developers and others from around the industry.

Over the course of the next ten days, developers will be asked to produce a product, widget or mashup using the APIs made available or others on the web (Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook, etc).

The second part will give developers the chance to showcase their idea at the  Travel Technology Europe event in London on Tuesday 8 February, where Tnooz has a dedicated presentation slot for THack.

One of the companies involved is TourCMS. The tour operator software company will be offering a cash prize for the best idea developed on its API. More details.

The best idea developed in the wider THack will be featured on Tnooz and also receive a prize.

Tnooz is inviting developers and any travel companies that wish to join THack to

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.