Rome2rio boasts the largest repository of transport routes available online, and we are continuing to add more transport regularly. This week we completed the addition of all bus routes operated by Greyhound Australia to the site.

Greyhound cover a lot of ground and provide useful links between cities that are not connected by rail. For example, Greyhound operate a regular service from Brisbane to Byron Bay: http://www.rome2rio.com/#!brisbane/byron+bay

Inter-city bus travel is also typically cheaper than rail travel in Australia. Here's a complete network map from the Greyhound Australia website:

One challenge we are starting to face as our repository of transport grows is keeping the data up to date. We've been working hard on developing new tools for identifying schedules that have changed, and making updates easier. If you find any routes or website links on the site that are incorrect, drop us a line at feedback(at)rome2rio.com

We are continuing to work hard at adding more train, bus and ferry routes across the globe to rome2rio. This week's addition is a big one - the entire rail network of Japan has been added to the site.

Japan boasts an extensive train system. The high-speed shinkansen bullet train runs the length of much of the country, travelling at speeds of over 200 km/h. A further network of Japan Railways train lines crisscross the islands. Many Japanese cities also have subway, streetcar and monorail networks.

The following map illustrates the main train lines of Japan:

All this makes getting around Japan as a tourist a breeze. In less than 6 hours you can travel from Tokyo down to Fukuoka, stopping at destinations such as Kyoto, Okayama, Hiroshima and Himeji along the way. The Japan Rail Pass, which must be purchased by travellers before entering the country, also helps make train travel in Japan economical. 

When displaying a rail route, rome2rio provides a link to the excellent Hyperdia website for train schedules.

Its also well worth reading Jose's Japan Tips before you embark for Japan. We thank Jose for helping us test the site before this release. Thanks to him, we found and fixed several bugs that caused incorrect trains changes to be shown around Tokyo. As always, if you find something that should be fixed, please send us some feedback. We're eager to make rome2rio the best site to discover how to get anywhere!

Today we launched the first non-English version of rome2rio. Thanks to the efforts of rome2rio fans Markus Teuber and Bodo von Billerbeck, we have translated the site for German speaking users:

If you'd like to try the site out in German, select Deutsch from the top rail:

Until now, the majority of visitors to rome2rio have been from English speaking countries such as Australia, India, the UK and the USA. We'd love to see more Europeans using rome2rio, so we decided to work on translating the site.

We hope to launch French and Spanish versions of rome2rio next - if you speak either language and would like to help with the translation effort, please send an email to us at feedback(at)rome2rio.com

We're continuing to build out rome2rio to offer a complete travel product to our users. This week's addition is rental car search, which is offered through a partnership with Car Trawler. To search for rental cars, select the cars window from the new welcome screen carousel and search.

As with rome2rio's transport search, you can specify any city, town, postcode or address for the pickup location. Rome2rio then searches rental cars from several providers, lists the rental options and lets you book your rental car immediately.

We've also added a new car rental option to each of the driving legs of rome2rio's transport search results. 

As with hotels, rental car bookings made through rome2rio provide us with a commission. So if you like the service, help us make some revenue and book your rental car through us.

We've added a new feature to rome2rio that makes it easier to explore your transport options. To activate the feature, click on the Transport button at the top-right corner of the map.

This will activate a new transport view, where we overlay all the train (blue), bus (green) and ferry (aqua) routes that rome2rio knows about on the map. Airports are also displayed as orange dots. You can easily view, for example, the train network of Spain as well as ferry links to Morocco:

The new view is also great for quickly visualizing where rome2rio has coverage. For example, we recently added the entire bus network of Seattle to rome2rio which is obvious from the swathe of green covering the city in transport view.

So, if you love to travel by rail, boat and bus like we do, use rome2rio to plan your next trip and be inspired by all the exciting destinations that are accessible without flying.

Yesterday the one millionth query was issued on rome2rio since we launch the site in April last year. A user from Portland, Oregon searched how to get from Portland Airport to Pistol River. Rome2rio nailed the query by presenting several alternatives including driving, taking the bus, and 4 flight options. 

It's an exciting milestone for us since we're still a small "garage startup" and so far we haven't spent a cent on any form of marketing to promote rome2rio. Most users hear about the site through word of mouth, often through viral email threads. Here's one such email we uncovered:

Over 120,000 people used rome2rio in January. Visitors come from around the globe, including from India, United States, United Arab Emirates, Australia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Canada.

Today we plotted all 1 million destinations searched for by our users on a world map:

This year we will continue to improve rome2rio and further expand train, bus and ferry coverage as we target our 10 millionth query!

We're excited to launch a new hotel search component of rome2rio today. When you do a search from, say, New York to Amalfi you will now have the option of viewing accommodation options at your destination. Hotels are listed as the final component of each itinerary on the left.

Once you select the hotels leg, you'll be presented with a new interface for browsing accommodation options and prices and making your selection for booking a place to stay.

Our hotel search has been made available through a partnership with Hotels Combined. We chose Hotels Combined for the same reason we show flight prices from Kayak.com: they have a larger inventory with more hotels and better prices than other hotel search engines. With rome2rio you can easily compare hotel details, prices, availability and taxes from Hotels.com, Travelocity.com, Expedia.com, Booking.com, and many more all in one set of search results.

Referral commissions from hotel searches are also how rome2rio makes money. Rome2rio is a free service and we have chosen not to display advertising on the site. However, the site does cost money to develop and run. Hotel commissions is, in start-up business speak, a big part of our monetization strategy. So if you love rome2rio, help us out by booking your next trip's accommodation through the site.

What you see today is the first version of our new hotel search product. We are planning to add several new hotel related features in the future. We would like to show en-route accommodation options, and directions to the address of your hotel. As always, we'll announce these developments on facebook and twitter so follow us there.

 

 

In the last week we've pushed out several changes to the site's user interface. We redesigned the experience so that flight schedules and transport information are no longer displayed using pop-outs over the map. Instead, clicking on each leg of the journey displays the relevant information inline above the map. Importantly, rome2rio now zooms in to show the selected leg in detail.

We've also made the date selection more intuitive to use. We hope this makes getting flight prices much easier than before. Of course, the date is completely optional because we love the experience of quickly browsing the flight options.

We greatly simplified the messaging on the welcome screen; a simple change that resulted in a substantial jump in traffic.

Getting the UI design for rome2rio right is challenging, and something we've blogged about previously here and here. Expect the design to continue evolving in 2012. To give you an idea of the progress we've made this year, here's what rome2rio looked like back in January:

We also pushed out a new feature today. As we described in this previous post, rome2rio has an explore feature where users can view all direct flights from a single airport on the map. To activate this view, input an origin (but not a destination) and select an airport from the list of the left. Alternatively, input a 3-letter airport code such as SFO. As of today, you can filter the destinations displayed by airline. This is especially useful for viewing, for example, all destinations that can be reached by a direct EasyJet flight from Stansted airport.

Please let us know what you think of the UI changes.

Last week, we launched North America rail and bus coverage on rome2rio. As part of that release, we also pushed out a new welcome screen experience with a high resolution image of Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland. Today we begin daily rotation of the background image with travel destinations around the world - an idea very successfully employed by my former employer Bing.

The location of each image is shown in the bottom-right corner. Click on the image to issue the destination as a query on rome2rio and discover how to get there. You can also browse past images.

We invite our users to submit their own high quality travel photographs to images<at>rome2rio.com.

As reported by The Next Web - Brilliant visual travel search service Rome2Rio adds US and Canadian train and bus routes - we launched US/Canadian surface transport coverage on rome2rio. Here's a map of the new coverage:

Coverage in North America has been sadly missing since we launched in April. Adding it turned out to be a mammoth task. Personally, I thought that train and bus travel in the US was all about Amtrak and Greyhound, but it turns out there are over 170 different operators serving routes across the country. Large providers include Trailways, Peter Pan Buses, Megabus, and CoachUSA, but there are also numerous operators that serve smaller regions of the country. For example, Portland to Astoria in Oregon is served by NorthWest Point, and Madison to Milwaukee is served by Badger Bus - companies I'd never heard of. We collated the routes for all these carriers to make it easier for travellers to figure out how to get from A to B in the US and Canada, even if the journey combines legs with several different bus and train companies (as well as flying), such as Nantucket to Kanata, ON:  

Here are the logos of train and bus transport providers we've added so far: