Direct Ferries has launched a ChatGPT app, offering conversational search and discovery on the artificial intelligence (AI) platform.
The app connects upwards of 300 operators and 4,000 routes in one interface, built on OpenAI’s enterprise infrastructure.
Niall Walsh, CEO of Direct Ferries, said the ferry sector, which caters to 4.4 billion passengers, is fragmented.
“Thousands of routes, hundreds of operators, most of them historically offline and impossible to search in one place,” Walsh said. “We've spent 25 years fixing that, aggregating global supply into a single inventory that no individual operator could ever build.”
Chris Corderoy, CTO of Direct Ferries, said the challenge with ferry market data—and its fragmentation—has been the lack of a defined industry standard for integration.
“Ferry operators run different systems, different formats, different APIs and different levels of real-time availability,” Corderoy said. “What we've built with Direct Ferries is that global standard, first with our Connect API and now with our latest MCP Server interface, it resolves all the complexity of global ferry travel at source, so that any Agentic search platform connecting to it gets clean, accurate, real-time inventory.”
Bringing Direct Ferries into ChatGPT marks the next step on the journey to solving fragmentation, Walsh said.
The app is available worldwide through the free version of ChatGPT. It’s powered by Direct Ferries’ model context protocol (MCP) server. Through the server, the company’s full inventory is available.
Direct Ferries said the same infrastructure will be offered to B2B partners through Direct Ferries Connect, which will allow travel companies to offer ferry search in their own AI products.
A slew of other travel companies have also launched ChatGPT apps as travelers ramp up AI usage in travel planning. The expanding group of brands includes Almosafer, Booking.com, Expedia, Accor, ixigo, Lighthouse and Skyscanner, among others.