April 19th, 2010
Ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. EDT) on April 17, 2010, by NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team
If your flight has been cancelled recently due to volcanic ash and you are looking for alternatives ways to reach your destination in Europe, then Zoombu can help. It is the only website where you can enter in your precise starting location and destination and run a single search across many modes of transport, including ferries, Eurostar, trains, coaches, driving and taxi options, and (when they are running) flights to find the best door-to-door route.
Currently news reports estimate that flights will continue to be suspended over Britain until 1am Tuesday 20th at the earliest. Here are some tips for travelling during the flight disruptions:
1. Run a search on Zoombu to see what door-to-door route options exist, including ferries or Eurostar trains. You can ’switch off’ flights in the results filter to exclude this option entirely
2. Click through to transport suppliers to check availability and make a booking directly. Be wary that some options, for example Eurostar trains, are booked out for up to a week ahead from now. Cross-channel ferries including Brittany Ferries and SeaFrance do still have some space on crossings despite a huge surge in bookings over the weekend, but tickets are being snapped up quickly.
3. Consider teaming up with others and hiring a car to reach the port (many car hire companies will let you return the car at a depot close to a port, rather than the pick-up depot, for an additional fee). There are also many train options to take you close to the ports. If you run a Zoombu search we can help you pick your way through the options.
4. If you have booked a flight that has been cancelled, you may be due compensation. The Which website is a great source of information about your rights. You should contact your airline straight away to request a refund or a ticket change.
5. If you’re stranded abroad you can call the helpline +44 207 008 0000 for travel updates and information on exceptional services.
Good luck with your travels and keep checking in for further updates.
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: alternative routes, European flights, flight cancellations
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April 14th, 2010
Be prepared and travel light on budget. Image taken by panS
The cost of additional fees charged by budget airlines have soared recently, so keep this in mind if you are planning to take a ‘budget flight’ this summer.
In particular, fees currently charged by Ryanair include:
- Administration Fee of £5 for each flight leg purchased
- First bag check-in fee of £15 each way, unless you happen to travel in July or August in which case you’ll pay an additional £5 since it’s “peak rate”
- Second bag check-in fee of £35 each way, or £40 during “peak” times (up from £20 last year)
- If you make the mistake of not booking with ryanair.com, you’ll pay £35-£40 to check-in the first bag and a shocking £70-80 to check in a second bag depending on the month you choose to travel
- Check-in fee of £5 each way (you must check-in online), and if you book via a call centre or the airport and forget your boarding pass you’ll pay a £40 ‘Airport Boarding Card Re-issue’ fee
- Musically minded or sporting folk are punished with a £40 each way for transportation of equipment
Don’t even think about taking more than 15kg per bag, or you’ll be stung by an unstated fee per extra kilo at the airport.
And as usual, you’d better not make any changes to your flight after booking as it costs £25 to change your flight and a whopping £100 for a name change with Ryanair.
So whilst you may be able to get a bargain flight for a few quid, watch you don’t get stung on the extras when it comes to travelling.
We are planning to add a fee calculator feature to our multi-modal travel search engine, so we’ll help you understand the full cost of flying ‘budget’. [If this is something you'd value, speak up and we'll move it up our priority list.] Furthermore, because we calculate the door-to-door cost and duration of a route, we factor in any pricey transfer costs sometimes associated with flying to a budget airport which could be a fair distance from your destination.
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: baggage fees, cheap flights, flight fees, Ryanair
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March 22nd, 2010
The free train to Geneva
Zoombu’s mission is to help you find the best route to your destination and make travelling easier. We love it when our team comes across hidden information to help you on your travels, like this gem from Geneva Airport.
Did you know that if you want to travel by train from Geneva Airport to Geneva, you can do so for free? Simply pick up a special ticket in the the machine in the baggage collection area at the Arrival level and use public transport in Geneva free for a period of 80 minutes. The Unireso ticket is offered by Geneva International Airport and the train to Geneva takes just 6 minutes. So if you need make a connection, or you have some time to kill at the airport, why not make use of this offer.
Rest assured that your Zoombu search results include connections like this one in the end-to-end routes we recommend.
As if this wasn’t enough; if Geneva is your destination and you are staying at a hotel, a youth hostel or a campsite, you can pick up the “Geneva Transport Card” that allows you to use public transport in Geneva free of charge during your stay. More information is available from Geneva Tourism. Brilliant! Come on London, how about matching that?!
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: Geneva, Getting to Geneva, Public Transport
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March 2nd, 2010
We were delighted to be invited to take part in the Google Travel Summit this year, held at their swanky offices in Zurich. The purpose of the event was to spark discussion around “the opportunity for the travel industry in the next 5-10 years”. Participants included 15 travel related start-ups (including TV Trip, Tripsay, Tourist Way, Memonic, eZSearch and Skyscanner), 5 VCs (Creata Ventures, Partech, Brains to Ventures, DJF Esprit and Howzat Media) and lots of Googlers to stir the debate.
The day kicked off with pitches and product demos from each company, followed by a VC panel, Google product demos and break-out sessions for business and technical debates.
Nelson Mattos, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, EMEA, gave a great introduction to the parameters of effective search: relevance, user experience, speed and comprehensiveness. As we’ve been thinking about the growth of Zoombu travel search, we’ve focussed efforts on these domains too, so we were pleased to see the commonality.
Data was a common theme throughout, both as an enabler of innovation, and as one of the biggest challenges faced by travel start-ups. Getting hold of data is time-consuming and difficult due to the wide rank of formats and lack of availability. However, those with data are able to do interesting and useful things in serving up information to users and ultimately helping them to make purchases. One of our current efforts is to gather information on local ’shuttle buses’, where timetables and prices may or may not be available online, are usually difficult to locate and are certainly not in a consistent format. It’s a painful process, but having access to this data means we can recommend great value end-to-end routes to our users.
Fancy a nap? Googlers in their sleep room.
The Googlers were keen to see what they could do to help innovation by sharing their data and services; an offer welcomed by all involved. They also wanted to show the start-ups how to do office culture properly and gave us a warm welcome to their home. When you have a slide into the staff canteen, Ben and Jerry’s fridges on every floor and a ’sleep room’ complete with tropical fish and jungle noises for post-lunch snoozes, you know you’ve made it.
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: Google, Google Travel Summit, Travel Search, Travel start-ups
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February 12th, 2010
Image by Dru
This week we welcome a guest post from a new Zoombu Ski user:
Whilst skiing is the sport that dominates the Alps during Winter, another, more remote sport, is also in full swing: ice climbing. This form of climbing involves the climber donning ice-axes and crampons, before they begin their upward ascent of a waterfall. Despite looking extremely precarious, it is not in fact as dangerous as some might think; the climber secures their ropes to ice-screws meaning that any fall is not usually serious, and the lower altitude (compared to climbing to the summit of an Alpine Peak) means the seriousness of an ascent is reduced.
In January I headed over to Chamonix to indulge in the sport of ice climbing. On the way out I was rather haphazard with my travel; I picked my flights far too late, didn’t plan my transfers, turned up at Geneva airport and spent a good while there figuring out how to get to Chamonix. I found a lift and got to Chamonix in one piece, although if I had to guarantee my arrival time, I would not recommend this approach. On the way back I didn’t leave things to chance – a missed flight would be disastrous. Fortunately Zoombu’s ski search was available so I used it to see what they could offer. Using the site I found out that Holiday Taxis would pick me up from the flat at 6:45am with no dramas, which indeed is what they did (and after a week swinging around on the ice, the last thing I needed was to be running around the town in the early hours looking for a lift!).
I’m off to Cham again in the summer and will definitely be using Zoombu. If only they had launched their site before I had booked the flight as well!
- Posted by Geoff
Tags: French Alps, Ice climbing, Journey planner, Transfers
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February 4th, 2010
Photo taken by Shay Haas
For those of you who are keen followers of Zoombu, you will have seen that this week has been a busy one for our team. We have just opened a mini version of Zoombu to the public, in the form of Zoombu Ski.
This side product has the functionality of the main Zoombu service, but a subset of the coverage. With Zoombu Ski you can find the best end-to-end way to travel from your home in the UK to a resort in the French Alps. We search a range of modes of transport and will pick out the cheapest, fastest or greenest end-to-end route for you.
With Zoombu Ski we want to find out what you the users like, don’t like and want to see improved about Zoombu. We are very keen for your feedback on the product and we listen to all of it. We meticulously log, debate and prioritise all of the points raised and this directly influences the product development plan.
Search speed is something that many of you have raised as important, and we are working on this as we speak. Shortly the Zoombu search will be noticeably faster. We’re also just about to add coverage to a bunch more ski resorts so look out for this in the next few days.
For those skiers amongst you, if you haven’t had your powder fix for the season yet, or you could be tempted to take another trip, then run a Zoombu search to find the best way to get to the slopes. There are some bargains to be had: we found a search result for door-to-door transport from Oxford to Chamonix over a long weekend in February for £100 including a flight out of Luton.
Happy planning!
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: French Alps, Ski Planning, Zoombu Ski
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December 15th, 2009
We are delighted to announce completion of an investment by the Saïd Business School Venture Fund in Zoombu. We were selected as a winner of the SBS Venture Fund final in May 2009, which was judged by the fund’s benefactors, Sir Philip Green and David Bonderman. After a rigorous due diligence and evaluation process, the Venture Fund Committee, which consists of MBA students and fellows of the Saïd Business School, approved Zoombu for investment.
The Saïd Business School Venture Fund originated in 2006 when the two benefactors collectively donated £1 million to fund winning early stage businesses of members and alumni of the Saïd Business School and the University of Oxford’s Entrepreneurs Society. Alistair and I both studied Engineering Science at Oxford University, and more recently Alistair obtained his DPhil from Oxford, so we qualified to applyto the Fund. We are excited by the opportunities the funding presents us to expand the team and accelerate development of our service, which is currently in private beta.
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: funding, Said Business School Venture Fund
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December 4th, 2009
Image by Alain Bachellier
Approximately 30% of web traffic related to travel is channelled through Google. Travel is the most searched for category on Google. So it’s not surprising then that the giants of search are especially keen to help travel companies (and ultimately their clients) to figure out how to navigate their way successfully through the economic crisis. [This crisis, according to EuroMonitor, has affected the travel industry worse than the aftermath of September 11th]
On Tuesday 1st December Google held ‘Travel Think 09′ where a couple of hundred industry leaders in the travel sector were invited for a day with Google and others to share insights and ideas for the future of travel.
I was proud to be invited to speak on their panel entitled “Innovate to Capture Consumers”, alongside Marko Balabanovic of Lastminute, Paul Kemp-Robertson of Contagious Magazine and Fergus Boyd of Virgin Atlantic. Richard Seymour (of Channel Four “Better by Design” fame) chaired the panel which drew on some key themes about current innovation in travel:
- Consumers no longer want to have to visit lots of separate sites to fulfill a search for travel – they want to have relevant results served up to them from a single place [Enter Zoombu; helping people to search "from A to B" instead of having to look for a flight, Eurostar, train, bus, or driving directions in many different places and piece search results together by hand]
- Mobile and location based services are becoming ever more important to travellers who are armed with iphones and the like. Augmented reality apps are becoming popular to assist travellers on the move
- Established brands need to engage with new and innovative concepts and companies in order to keep up with consumers and ultimately to survive
- Power and knowledge is now in the hands of the consumer and not the brand, thanks to the wealth of real-time, social and search apps
Other speakers included Google’s UK MD Matt Brittin, Tamer Tamar, President of eBookers and Danny Barrasso, Head of eCommerce at Hilton and a fascinating talk by Ben Schott (writer of Schott’s Almanac). The event was held in the Royal Geographical Society, which is arguably the most significant institute of travel and exploration in the UK having supported such famous names as Livingstone, Stanley, Scott, Shackleton, Hunt and Hillary.
Thanks to Google for inviting me along.
- Posted by Rachel
Tags: Google Travel Think
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November 12th, 2009
We’re delighted to post some travel tips from our MBA intern Sharad Piplani. Sharad has travelled widely within the Middle East and India and has recently started living in Madrid. He shares his recent experiences as a first-timer with Ryanair…
This week, I took my first Ryanair flight. I have long wanted to experience flying with the notorious airline first hand and I finally got my chance today on a flight to Rome.
I type this post on the flight, cramped up on a seat that refuses to incline. That said, I feel fortunate to be sitting at all, having heard the rumours that Ryanair is challenging regulators to allow standing tickets; just another O’Leary innovation for the low cost flying model!
Here are a few of my personal first-timer tips for surviving Ryanair:
- While booking your Ryanair flight, use a Visa Electron to pay or be prepared to pay another 5 EUR per person per one way flight at a minimum with any other card.
- Beware of the Ryanair voucher. The voucher is designed to book flights in one go and cannot be used again later as it expires
- Ryanair now charges EUR 40 if you forget to print your boarding pass, a charge that could be more than the cost of your flight!
- You are now allowed just 10 Kilos of cabin luggage on the flight. This is just one bag inclusive of your laptop and other electronic goods. You pay for any bag you check in.
- If you think that your bag is slightly over-sized and will not fit the baggage slot at the boarding gate, then be prepared to layer up with extra clothing or discard a few items. My friend had a hard-bound bag with wheels and the bag would not fit in. The lady at the counter would not budge either and insisted on a fee despite the bag weighing less than 10 kilos, which is the new allowed limit on Ryanair flights. Tip: Tilt the bag with the wheels up and the bag slides right in.
- The life vest being used during safety demonstration may look extremely weathered! I managed to locate my life vest above me after five minutes of feeling the underside of my seat.
- If you’re a smoker and you’re desperate for your fix whilst on board, believe it or not, Ryanair now sell smokeless cigarettes (as well as a range of average drinks and food for top end prices). Ten cigarettes with real nicotine cost 6 EUR.
- Finally, don’t forget to join the group fun and clap when your flight lands!
- Posted by Sharad
We are keen travellers here at Zoombu and are building a bank of real accounts and tips on travelling via a whole range of transport options in order to prevent unexpected wallet dents and to help you on your way.
Tags: Ryanair
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October 16th, 2009
Photo by Joshua Davis
We wanted to share an update on our product development, especially for those of you who have expressed an interest in trying out Zoombu.
Our private beta currently serves routes within the UK and from the UK to France and three weeks ago we gave a lot more people access to trial the service. We are pleased to say that we have now doubled our test user base. The response from those of you who have tried out the beta has been brilliant, and we are very grateful for all the valuable feedback we have had so far.
For those of you who we have not yet given invitations, we know you are there waiting and thank you for your patience. We will be issuing more invitations in a few weeks, but in the mean time we are knuckling down to address the feedback we’ve been given.
On another note, it’s been an exciting week for the Zoombu team as we have a new team member! John joins us full time after working in games development and then as chief developer for Seedcamp and we’re delighted to welcome him to the fold.
- Posted by Rachel
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