Online booking finally coming to Europe

[CHamilton]

Planes, trains, and automobiles: why is booking a trip through Europe such a nightmare?
Two Berlin startups pursue the holy grail of online booking

Europe has a travel problem. High-speed railways, budget airlines, and a single currency have made border crossing easier than ever before. For Americans accustomed to long flights and few railways, the European model can seem like a breath of fresh air. Actually booking a trip, on the other hand, can be surprisingly cumbersome.


Despite (and, in some ways, because of) Europe's tight connectivity, there isn't an easy way for travelers to compare and combine different modes of travel. A 2012 EU regulation on data sharing has certainly made railway booking more seamless, but comparing train rates to plane fares — or even combining train, plane, and public transit into one itinerary — has thus far remained a difficult and disjointed task. For web users, this typically involves hidden costs, repeated Google searches, and multiple browser tabs.

Two startups in Berlin are hoping to change that. Late last month, GoEuro launched an early version of its travel booking website, where users can search and compare rates across different modes of transportation — plane, train, bus, and car — at a single glance. For now, the site is only optimized for travel within Germany and the UK, but GoEuro plans to expand to other markets in the near future. When it does, it will begin to rival Berlin-based Waymate and become one of the top two competitors in Europe's "multi-modal" travel space.

...Nareen Shaam, GoEuro founder and CEO,... says... getting access to data from railway operators and airlines. Most train data, including timetables and station coordinates, is controlled by government organizations in Europe, and many have been reluctant to share in the past.

Germany's government-run Deutsche Bahn, for example, threatened legal action against a developer in 2012 after he published train schedules and coordinates in an online database. Deutsche Bahn officials claimed that the act violated copyright law, as well as the organization's existing agreements with third-party companies. In this case, the third-party company was Google.

Both Britain and France have made moves to open source their travel data in recent years, but in many cases, accessing this information still requires negotiations and partnerships....

Yet obtaining data is only the first challenge; making sense of it, Shaam says, can be just as difficult. Germany alone has around 9,000 train stations, and railway, airport, and bus schedules are often coordinated with disparate back-end data systems. Whereas airport codes are universal (CDG, for instance, denotes Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport across all search sites), railway stations are anything but.
...
Even in its early incarnation, GoEuro seems to have handled the task remarkably well, pulling in real-time data from its partners rather than scraping from other sites. Searching for itineraries within and between Germany and the UK brings up a collection of bus, train, and airway options, classified by price and speed. Notably, the results also include travel time to and from airports, as well as the estimated wait time at ticket counters and security.

The design is more aesthetically pleasing than Waymate's platform, though it's not quite as ambitious. On Waymate's website and iOS app, both launched in April, users can not only compare different transport modes as they do on GoEuro, but book their trips directly from the site itself.

Both, however, admit that there's still plenty of work to do. GoEuro is looking to launch its own mobile app soon, and Kirsty Lee, Waymate's head of product, says her company has turned its attention to Android development as well. In both cases, there are still significant gaps in coverage; bus routes in the UK are incomplete on GoEuro, and the Italian market, for one, is virtually nonexistent on either site.

 

[jis]

It's time that we started addressing this issue just for rail travel in US. The European are actually quite a bit better when it comes to inter-agency rail reservations and ticketing. In the US the attitude seems to be that since not too many people travel by rail it is not something worth worrying about. And surprisingly, the rail operators do not appear to want to do anything about it either.

Try getting from Middletown NY to Odenton MD. It is eminently possible to do it by train with many many possible connections per day. But try figuring it out, much less get a single through ticket or even a set of tickets from a single source. Not easy and not possible.

 

[cirdan]

It's time that we started addressing this issue just for rail travel in US. The European are actually quite a bit better when it comes to inter-agency rail reservations and ticketing. In the US the attitude seems to be that since not too many people travel by rail it is not something worth worrying about. And surprisingly, the rail operators do not appear to want to do anything about it either.
Try getting from Middletown NY to Odenton MD. It is eminently possible to do it by train with many many possible connections per day. But try figuring it out, much less get a single through ticket or even a set of tickets from a single source. Not easy and not possible.

Seeing Amtrak doesn't really provide a system serving every relevant locality, even avid railfuns such as us will have to take buses here and there to get to locations that are either not on Amtrak, or that would require lengthy detours or setting out at ungodly hours. What is needed is a timetable enquiry system that combines the timetebles of Amtrak, commuter railroads, metros and the various bus providers (both long-distance and urban) into a single system and so help people work out the true options for getting from A to B (as in any location to any location to any location rather than station to station). In the UK such an integrative system is provided by traveline. Besides timetables it also knows about walking and you can tell it how far you would be willing to walk to get from say a station to a bus terminal if doing so would open additional combinations that could be of value to you. It even works out fares although it does not actually sell the tickets. You have to go to the individual providers for that.

 

[CHamilton]

Pan-European Rail Travel Booking Service, Loco2, Gets Renfe On Board For Full Spanish Coverage

Pan-European train travel booking startup, Loco2, will add another chunk of coverage to its website tomorrow, when a partnership with Spanish state-owned rail carrier Renfe goes live — enabling users to book any Spanish rail tickets via the service and print them at home.

This also applies to advanced discount fares, known as Turista Promo, supporting potential ticket discounts of up to 70%.
Prior to the partnership, some Spanish rail journeys were already bookable via Loco2 but only as postal tickets and at higher prices.

 

[Ryan]

Try getting from Middletown NY to Odenton MD. It is eminently possible to do it by train with many many possible connections per day. But try figuring it out, much less get a single through ticket or even a set of tickets from a single source. Not easy and not possible.

Why would anyone want to come to Odenton?

 

[SarahZ]

Try getting from Middletown NY to Odenton MD. It is eminently possible to do it by train with many many possible connections per day. But try figuring it out, much less get a single through ticket or even a set of tickets from a single source. Not easy and not possible.

Why would anyone want to come to Odenton?

For beef stroganoff. Duh.

 

[the_traveler]

Or to say you went to somewhere in the middle of nowhere!

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Booking a trip through Europe is a nightmare? Online booking has existed for many years. This article appears to be full of exaggerations and overreactions with little in the way of relevant evidence or comparisons. Sounds like a bunch of whining about having to get your ducks in a row before you can sell other people's data as your own.

 

[Trogdor]

What is needed is a timetable enquiry system that combines the timetebles of Amtrak, commuter railroads, metros and the various bus providers (both long-distance and urban) into a single system and so help people work out the true options for getting from A to B (as in any location to any location to any location rather than station to station). In the UK such an integrative system is provided by traveline. Besides timetables it also knows about walking and you can tell it how far you would be willing to walk to get from say a station to a bus terminal if doing so would open additional combinations that could be of value to you.

Such a system already exists. It's called Google Transit, and most public transportation providers, including Amtrak, are already on it.
In fact, I just looked up Middletown, NY to Odenton, MD, on Google, and it tells me to take the Port Jervis line to Secaucus, NEC Line to Newark, Vermonter to New Carrollton, and MARC to Odenton.

It can't sell tickets, but it does provide a web link to NJT, Amtrak, and MARC.

 

[jis]

Now only if google could start a "Google Ticketing Service" and manage to enter into appropriate deals with all the agencies to use a common fare instrument which Google could then sell, we'd all be in good shape and Google could probably make a pot of money. But this will not happen because the rail passenger outfits seem to be incapable of coming to any agreement on a common fare instrument, sort of a rail EZ-Pass. Fortunately the technology of e-Tickets on Smartphones may get around that barrier via something like Apple Passbook or equivalent on the Android platform.

 

[CHamilton]

And another rail booking service.

How Capitaine Train Is Disrupting Train Ticket Booking Through Engineering

 

[CHamilton]

Pan-European Rail Travel Startup Loco2 Adds Italy’s Trenitalia

U.K.-based pan-European train travel startup Loco2 has integrated its sixth European rail booking system, signing up the Italian national rail operator Trenitalia. The integration will go public on March 3 but registered users of Loco2 can book tickets from today.

 

[jis]

Now if we could just get online booking for all passenger rail service in the US, that would be cool

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Now if we could just get online booking for all passenger rail service in the US, that would be cool

Has anyone ever explained why you still can't redeem points for a sleeper or a connection online? Seems like a pretty glaring oversight in 2015.