Travel search site, Rome2rio, in a major upgrade, now delivers estimated fares for air, train, taxi and other transport elements – door to door – in all search results.
“That means a trip that begins with a shuttle to the airport, then a flight, a train from the destination airport to a regional city and finally a taxi to the hotel will be priced down to the final component”, said Rome2rio CEO Rod Cuthbert.
Touting it as a world’s first, the company believes travellers will obtain significant benefits from the new functionality.
Pictured left: example search result for downtown Melbourne to the Marlborough House Hotel at 321 Woodstock Road, Oxford, UK.
“For the first time, the frustration many travellers 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,” added Cuthbert
The company said that as displayed pricing is indicative, many factors could impact the actual fares that travelers will pay.
“Internally, we’re aiming to be within 10% of the actual price,” said Rome2rio co-founder Michael Cameron, “but we expect that over time we can improve on this target.”
Last year Rome2rio developed a machine learning approach for modeling the fares of 196 airlines based on historical data. It has now applied a similar approach to over 1,500 train, bus, ferry and taxi operators across the globe.
“To create models for such a diverse range of transport companies we used a global team of data researchers and collected thousands of pricing data points. The result is almost complete coverage for the 185,000 routes currently in our transport database. While the coverage is comprehensive it is not 100% complete, and we will continue to add routes and operators in all parts of the globe,” said Cameron.
Estimated pricing is now live on the Rome2rio.com website, and to users of the company’s API and White Label solutions. More information is available here.
