Tag Archives: travel

Greyhound Australia routes added to rome2rio

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:

Greyhound

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

Daily background travel destination image

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.

R2r-bgs

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.

R2r-scroll

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

New rome2rio features, better data and UI improvements

We pushed out a new version of rome2rio this week. Here are some of the improvements we made:

Support entering a country, state or airport code

We regularly analyze our search logs to see what sort of queries users are entering into rome2rio. We noticed that users sometimes input countries (such as France, Peru or Canada) and states (such as Hawaii or California) rather than cities and towns. Previously rome2rio did an OK job of these queries, presenting routes to a random location in the middle of the country.

With this release we now specially handle these queries by showing the users routes to the major towns and cities in the region. Perhaps you’re planning a trip to Japan but don’t mind whether your adventure starts in Tokyo, Osaka or Fukuoka? It makes perfect sense to be able to search rome2rio for routes to Japan.

We also noticed plenty of users inputing IATA 3-letter airport codes into rome2rio, and we now support these properly.

Seattle-hawaii

Better European train data

We’ve improved the quality of the underlying train data that rome2rio uses to find routes. Our coverage in Switzerland has improved a lot. We’ve also added more local trains in Europe (eg: subways, trams and S-Bahns) including the London Tube.

Rome2rio now also factors the train frequency into consideration when presenting routes. Previously, infrequent trains such as the thrice daily express service from London Elephant + Castle to Gatwick Airport was recommended to users, giving them an unrealistic expectation of the typical travel time to Gatwick airport from Vauxhall (now fixed). 

Vauxhall-gatwick

Various UI improvements

Based on feedback from our users, we’ve made various minor changes to rome2rio’s UI. The new layout is cleaner, the Show prices button is more prominent, selecting flights for purchase is more intuitive, and the icons on the map and left rail makes the transport modes clearer.

We hope you like these changes and enjoy watching rome2rio continue to evolve. We’ve got plenty more exciting stuff in the pipeline that we’ll post about in the next few months. Stay tuned.

France’s incredible mechanical elephant at Les Machines de l’île in Nantes

The French are known for some pretty impressive engineering feats, such as the Eiffel Tower or TGV Train network. Less well known however is the amazing engineering accomplished by the Les Machines de l’île, an artistic and tourist project based in Nantes about 3 hours train ride west of Paris.

The highlight of a visit to the project is a ride on the centerpiece of the project – The Great Elephant. This impressive mechanic beast is 12 metres high, can carry 40 passenger and plods along slowly, spraying water and trumpeting loudly. The 45 minute ride costs 7 Euro. The elephant is actually a replica of one that featured in The Sultan’s Elephant, an unusual street show that took place in London in 2006.

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The other major component of Les Machines de l’île is a visit to the workshop (also 7 Euros). There, visitors have a chance to view and ride components of a new attraction in the works: a massive 25 meter high carousel featuring sea creatures on three levels. Several of the sea creatures have already been built, and each one is ridden by a small group of guests. It’s a pretty incredible sight even though the project is far from finished.

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To discover various routes to Nantes from your hometown on rome2rio click here.

rome2rio launch analysis

A few weeks ago Bernie and I visited San Francisco to kick off the launch of the beta version of rome2rio. The launch went well and we received a healthy spike in traffic, some great user feedback, and interest from a variety of potential partners. We also learnt a lot during the few weeks we spent in the US. We put our tools down and were busy networking and meeting a range of interesting people who offered plenty of advice.

The launch was kicked off on April 7th with articles on Techcrunch and Venture Beat. rome2rio also featured on Tnooz, the most prominent travel tech news site. The story was then picked up by a variety of news sites including Fast Company, Lifehacker, ReadWriteWeb, Thrillist, and Travolution. The most exciting and surprising coverage, however, was being featured on KSTP, a television station in the Twin Cities region of Minneapolis and Saint Paul:

Kstp

We also discovered plenty of coverage from foreign languages sites. We’ve had a jolly time reading the translated “googlish” reviews. This Italian blog post described our coverage and says “That should be enough to help us design the majority of travel and holidays, unless we go to very remote places or unknown to the human race.” A Chinese write-up translates to “so we need to do is the other side, from the airport to where you want, do not let us vacation at the airport.”

Our traffic spiked during the launch and our servers handled it pretty well, despite our hardware load balancer sadly falling over for about 30 minutes when the Techcrunch article went out. Since the launch the traffic has plateaued at around 800 – 1000 unique users a day; clearly we’ve still got our work cut out for us to build a large enough user base for rome2rio to be a profitable business. But it’s a good start. We’ve got plenty of exciting improvements in the pipeline, and the site will only get better in coming year.

We now have plenty of user activity log data from the launch. We extracted out the ten most popular destinations input into rome2rio:

London: 914
Paris: 891
New York: 752
Rome: 645
Barcelona: 529
San Francisco: 423
Rio de Janeiro: 404
Amsterdam: 377
Sydney: 351
Madrid: 350
Las Vegas: 350

I’m guessing Rome and Rio de Janeiro were on people’s minds when they tried the site. We’ve pulled plenty of other interesting statistics from the logs, but I’ll save more pretty graphs for another blog post. Anything in particular you’d like to see analysed?

rome2rio can save you a lot of money

rome2rio can save you money. A lot of money. I’m going to show you how.

Image you live in Quebec City. You need to travel to Brussels for business. You do a search on a travel search site like Orbitz from Quebec airport (YQB) to Brussels airport (BRU), flying on June 14th, and this is the top result:

Quebec-brussels-14june-orbitz

This is the cheapest option Orbitz found. It’s a 22 hour journey involving three flights. Fun stuff; especially if one of those flights is delayed and you miss the connection. 

Now let’s do the same search on rome2rio. Here’s a snapshot of the top four results that are presented:

Quebec-brussels-14june

Wow, that’s a big difference. It is $545 cheaper to fly to Paris then catch the train to Brussels. Even accounting for the cost of the TGV journey, that’s still a big saving. It’s also faster because there is a direct flight to Paris. Much faster in fact; roughly 10 hours total journey time instead of 22 hours in the air for the cheapest Orbitz option. 

If we select the Fly to Paris option and inspect the flight prices, we see more detail. Air Transat is a budget airline that fly direct from Quebec to Paris. There’s a high-speed TGV train that whisks you straight from the airport to Brusselles-Midi train station in under 2 hours. 

Quebec-brussels-14june-paris

rome2rio can save you both time and a lot of money, especially for journeys into or within Europe. The combination of high-speed rail and high density of airports and cities means there’s often several possible ways to reach your destination. We’ve seen as much as $1,000 variation in price between the different options.