Seakale at Shingle Street on the Suffolk coast.
For me, the Zoombu service is a necessity. All too frequently I have run into problems planning travel online, trying to work out how different services connect up, or just how to get from one place to another. The last two weekends were no exception.
On the first weekend, I needed to get from London to Ipswich. National Express East Anglia seem to be running rail replacement services every weekend this year. The the first warning sign of this was when I saw a notice displayed at Ipswich station in the summer proudly reporting something to the effect of “We have had a full service on the weekends since June 20th 2008” – which arguably should be the normal state of affairs, and not news worthy.
The train from Ipswich to London (usual journey time 1 hour 10 minutes) was going to take 2 hours 20 minutes as it was a bus from Ipswich to Billericay and then a train from there into the centre of London. Without Zoombu I would have needed to launch a separate search on the National Express Coaches site to see if they had a better service that day. The Zoombu service automatically covers this possibility, and made it clear that in this case the coaches were no better, with only three services on the Sunday, taking two and a half hours to reach London.
The cliffs at Étretat
The next challenge was the type of problem that originally inspired me to work on Zoombu: The best route from South West London to Normandy without a car – arriving in any of the coastal ports that are near Lisieux (where I could be picked up from). This requires knowledge of the port locations, ferry routes and operators, whether the ferries connect to public transport (e.g. does the last ferry return before the last train home), driving distance of the ferry terminals from Lisieux, and the impact of all this on the total travel time and cost. Not to mention the niceties of how to get between the railway station and the ferry terminal – without falling into such traps as thinking that ‘Portsmouth Harbour’ railway station is the best one for getting to ‘Portsmouth Continental Ferry Terminal’ – Portsmouth and Southsea railway station is both nearer and served by more trains.
The sun rise from the ferry arriving in Le Havre.
Planning such a trip usually requires use of google maps, railway sites, coach sites, several ferry company websites (possibly the most painful of all travel sites to use), local bus websites, and general searching on google for information about transport to and from the terminals. It takes hours and is really frustrating.
Zoombu eradicates this painful process – a simple search from my home address to Lisieux finds all these data automatically, and builds them into complete itineraries, clearly displaying the cost, duration, and carbon footprint of each possible route. Zoombu even draws them all on a map. I can see which one is best (in my case the cheapest, I do work for a start-up, after all), and book it directly from the provider. Easy.
Oh, and if you are wondering about what the optimal route was – it was Clapham Junction to Portsmouth and Southsea by train, taxi to the continental ferry port, and an overnight ferry to Le Havre with LD Lines. The return was similar, but a day ferry back.
Posted by Alistair
