Interesting ramping up of metasearch services from TripAdvisor today with the addition of European rail services to its existing flight metasearch engine.
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.