In what could be one of the most interesting new features in the travel startup space this year, point-to-point travel planning site rome2rio is now offering complete journey pricing of trips mapped out on the service.
The feature is truly going to reframe many travel-related searches, as travelers can now get a handle on the complete journey from the get-go. Rather than just having the length and cost of the flight portion, or having to go through different sites and aggregating itineraries on TripIt, travelers can now discover the true characteristics of a potential journey upfront.
Rome2rio CEO Rod Cuthbert is unsurprisingly enthused about this new major feature:
That means a trip that starts with a shuttle to the airport, then a flight, a train from the airport to a regional city and finally a taxi to the hotel will be priced down to the final component.For the first time, the frustration many travelers feel with itineraries that stop at the destination city airport rather than their actual destination can be addressed. Travelers can now make more informed decisions, choosing transport options based on a better understanding of costs and the options available to them.We expect this new functionality will spur even more OTAs and Business Travel specialists to plan integrations of the Rome2rio platform in their own sites and apps.
Given this end-to-end functionality, it does indeed seem more likely that other organizations will be much more likely to integrate Rome2rio into their workflow and/or internal apps. Especially for travel advisors, this sort of information could be invaluable in both scheduling and pricing out a trip.
The ability to both deliver a final price and itinerary is valuable, and will most definitely be a significant competitive advantage as consumers are evaluating different travel planning search tools. Especially for the traveler seeking different solutions - perhaps flying into a different airport and traveling overland - this new feature will be extremely useful.
On the technology side of things, the company aims to be at least within 10% of the actual price.
Co-founder Michael Cameron:
We expect that over time we can improve on this target. During our beta phase, we’ve had plenty of feedback that tested prices were “spot on”, but we are more interested in the cases where we are off the mark, as that allows us to fine tune our algorithm. This machine learning component of the system is critical to its overall success, and will be an ongoing part of its development.
Cuthbert echoes Cameron's concerns, saying that
The most important goal now is to attain 100% coverage (every train route, every bus line, every ferry) and to continue to work on the accuracy of routing and pricing.
The pricing data comes from a variety of sources, such as flight data from OAG Aviation, and was derived by using a global team of researchers to gather historical data from 196 airlines and 1,500 bus, train and ferry routes. By gathering these pricing data points, the company is able to offer almost complete coverage of the 185,000 routes currently in the transport database.
While this means that not every route will have point-to-point pricing or be searchable in the Rome2rio database, the company is using machine learning to improve the algorithm as more searches occur.
The new feature will be available on the company's homepage, as well as via their white label solution and API.