Earlier in the year, Arnaud and I went to a conference where we met Alistair Hann and Rachel Armitage, two of the founders of Zoombu.com. We were very interested in their product and we’d like to introduce it to you today.
Zoombu is a travel search engine that finds the best route to reach your destination. Zoombu compares flights, ferries, trains, driving, and transfers in a single search, and finds the cheapest, fastest or greenest door-to-door way to reach your destination. Currently focussed on Europe, Zoombu is fully independent and takes into account prices and journey details for thousands of route options involving 150 airlines, 100 ferry operators, 50 hire car providers, multiple specialist transfer firms and local bus and train services.
Say for example you’re looking for a weekend break to Paris. Instead of simply finding the cheapest flight from Heathrow to Charles De Gaulle Airport, Zoombu will consider all nearby airports, calculate all the associated airport transfer costs (e.g. London Underground, Heathrow Express, Paris Metro, airport shuttle bus), and then do the same for the Eurostar and ferry crossings. By comparing all these travel possibilities in one go it will find your optimal journey – all in one simple search.
The idea for Zoombu was developed by Dr Alistair Hann whilst working as a researcher at the University of Oxford. His frustrations at the difficulty of planning a trip away coupled with his technological experience drove him to tackle the problem. He was fed up of visiting multiple sites, opening many browser tabs, and compiling route options by hand. Others shared his frustrations and he knew that it would be possible to build a tool to automate the search process.
The team has won several awards since they started out, including the Eye for Travel Summit ‘Best Travel Start-Up’ May 2009, the University of Oxford Saïd Business School Venture Fund 2009, Travel Trade Gazette Big Idea finalist 2009 and was a finalist at Seedcamp in 2008. Zoombu was opened to the public in March of this year, as a Beta product.
There is a lot more that the team is working on in terms of adding services, and user feedback is really important to help continually improve the product, so do try it out for your next trip to Europe and let them know how you find it.
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