Multimodal Transport Planning Should Be Part of Your Comprehensive Services

Travel planning that focuses only on flights and hotels doesn’t provide the comprehensive travel planning services customers need and want. Adding car rentals and activity booking goes a step further, but still isn’t complete. To offer truly comprehensive planning services, companies need to help customers plan their journey from the moment they walk out their door to the moment they arrive at their accommodation. Doing that requires considering not just flights and car rentals, but also the possibility of travel by train, bus, ferry, rideshare or other means of travel.

That level of support isn’t needed just to soothe nervous first-time travelers. Business travelers don’t want to hassle with getting to their hotel before or after a long day of work. Adventurous travelers need help getting to smaller cities that don’t have airports. Environmentally conscious travelers want to choose ecofriendly modes of travel. Budget travelers need options that cost less than a plane. Millennials and other travelers crave the authenticity of using the same transportation that locals use.

As a result of these trends, the multi-modal search market is increasing. Google Maps has included multimodal search since 2013. This year, Rome2Rio reported a 53 percent increase in traffic from the US and Liligo just introduced multi-modal search in its US offering.

Multimodal Transport Search is Necessary But Faces Challenges

Although there’s clearly a need for multimodal search, there are also many challenges to be overcome. Companies need to build systems that can:

• Create travel plans from any address. While Google Maps creates routes between two specific addresses, most travel booking sites build routes only between fixed points, such as airports and train stations. Providing a door-to-door travel solution requires letting the customer specify the precise origin and destination points.

• Create many more potential routes. Once you expand travel planning to consider options like trains, buses, and ridesharing, the number of potential routes increases significantly. In addition to different combinations of modes of travel, there are many more potential schedules to offer, as trains and buses can depart frequently during peak travel hours.

• Enable users to filter the potential routes effectively. Users may have many criteria for evaluating the proposed routes. Some travelers may be concerned with cost, others with the length of the journey. Some will make their decision based on time of departure or time of arrival. Travelers will need to consider the number of connections and the time between each connection. Different modes of travel offer different levels of comfort and amenities; some travelers will be happy to disconnect for the length of a bus ride, while others need to be “on” all the time. Companies need to come up with effective ways to present this information to help travelers make a decision rather than overwhelming them with hundreds of options they can’t compare.

• Support booking with real-time prices. Once customers sort through the potential routes and choose their favorite, they don’t want to have to book components separately. The site needs to support end-to-end booking as well as end-to-end travel.

As environments and methods for dealing with big data become more available, solving these problems becomes more feasible, but it depends on the travel operators making data available. Currently many of the train, bus and ferry operators don’t have data available through APIs that online applications could easily use; many rely on PDF files or HTML tables that aren’t easy to work with. In many cases the schedules are designed to meet the needs of local travelers rather than those building a complex itinerary.

The European Commission has been working for several years to support the development of multi-modal travel planning within Europe. As that effort bears fruit, online travel agents may find incorporating multi-modal information directly into their site or partnering with companies that have that ability allows them to differentiate their services from their competitors and gain the profits of booking the first and last miles of each trip.