French car manufacturing giant Citroen will today launch a new multi-modal travel comparison site called Multicity.
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:
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: