Travel aggregation is a crowded market and what’s really needed is travel planning – across the different modes of travel (bus, train and flight)
Hyderbad based, Nearhop is attempting to be the travel planner and computes all the possible ways using bus/ flight/ train with combinations upto 3-hops.
Nearhop claims 5,000 places and has database of 38000 flights/trains/buses. For eg if you give ‘AAA’ as the source and ‘BBB’ as the destination, NearHop enumerates the list of all direct services from ‘AAA’ to ‘BBB’. It also enumerates the list of all 2-hop paths to reach from ‘AAA’ to ‘BBB’. An example of a 2-hop path is first to reach a station, say ‘CCC’ from ‘AAA’ by flight/train/bus and from there go to ‘BBB’ by flight/train/bus. 3-hop paths are also enumerated if they are appropriate.
Few features:
- Given a source, destination and date, NearHop creates a travel plan. i.e it computes and enumerates the list of all “possible paths which include arrival time, departure time, fare, number of hops, service details, availability” to reach the destination from the source. A “possible path” can be either direct bus/flight/train or combination of the above.
- Lists the possible paths upto 3-hops.
- Lists the day specific schedules. ie A flight may deptart at 3:00PM on sun, mon and tue and depart at 7:00PM on remaining days.NearHop computes the schedules specific to a day.
- Lists the links to book the tickets.
- Displays timetable of flight, bus and train for each city; shows the map for your journey
NearHop has also created database of bus/local train routes (for Bangalore,Mumbai,Chennai,Delhi,Hyderabad and Kolkata) and one can download the .jar/.jad file from here.
One of the most interesting feature is the local travel part: you can search for local train and bus timings (sort of navigator) and to me, that seems like a very relevant and useful info.
Aggregation of this sort is quite needed in the travel space, and Nearhop really needs to improve on data presentation – the current version seems too complex (and cluttered) to understand.
Do give Nearhop a hop and share your comments.
Hi Ashish,
Thanks for your review.
We are working on improving the UI.
–Venkat
isn’t it like 90di.com + bus??
Very noble idea, only need some serious UI review.
Great going guys, i love that i can have combined route by Bus and flight.
Tried the local search for bangalore, Koramangala to Jayanagar bus routes and number. What can I say, I am impressed. It will certainly be of great help for people like me who aren’t aware of the bus routes around town.
Also, as mentioned earlier by @Shashank, the UI needs much improvement. Hopefully it will happen soon as @Venkat pointed out.
Indeed a very useful site. Tried the local search for bangalore, one thing which I noticed was that it was grouping the end destinations. For example if i want to go from bommanahalli to mg road, the bus suggested was from bommanahalli to kr market and from kr market to mg road. This grouping is correct but would take much longer, i can easily get down at an intermediate stop and take another bus to MG Road.
Since buses do not have a defined stop it is difficult to get a desirable result. This would not be a problem in case of train searches.
Usual thing. Hyderbad based, Nearhop is attempting to be the travel planner and computes all the possible ways using bus/ flight/ train with combinations upto 3-hops.
Interesting !
Good luck !
Looks good so far..
Interesting and a very much needed service, just that it would be great if they could show the complete route on top of the map at least in case of intra-city travel.
For Delhi, RouteGuru can certainly help them.
Interesting concept. Need to work on the UI part. I bet, their local search would be the most used. For small towners, travelling in cities like bangalore and hyderabad is a nightmare. Good Luck!
For the moment, i believe they should leave out the UI part. what would be really interesting is they also bringing in the time calculations. that would involve checking out every stoppage of land-based based modes and general traffic conditions prevalent on the route. may sound quite far fetched… but no one has made a start in this direction. The traffic conditions are the most difficult to predict and i think avg times should do for the moment.
hey why dont you guys collaborate with auto unions and taxi-wallahs?