Rome2rio is a neat, ‘multi-modal’ travel search engine that we’ve raved about in the past, and now it’s opening up new access free-of-charge options for its API in order to bring the same service to any site or app that wants it.
Want to know how to get from your home in a village outside London to your friend’s house in southern Italy? Rome2rio will not only give you flight details, it takes care of helping you book the full door-to-door journey, including trains, buses, ferries and taxis.
Until now, third parties have had to pay to access Rome2rio’s API, following the company’s shift to a B2B model in May last year. With the new access options, developers will be able to make 100,000 search requests per month without charge.
The idea here is to boost adoption of the service, encouraging sites to offer multi-modal travel search. Melbourne, Australia-based Rome2rio CEO Rod Cuthbert believes that “any site that’s serious about selling travel in Europe and Asia has to offer multi-modal search sooner or later.”
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It’s certainly true that being able to book door-to-door travel makes life easier if you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before. Plotting a journey from my home city of Manchester, UK to a completely plucked-out-of-the-air destination of Modesto, California, reveals that I need to take a train to the airport, a flight via London to San Francisco, the BART to Oakland, and then an Amtrak train to Modesto. Working that all out myself would have taken a lot longer and would have been far more frustrating.
Rome2rio is well placed to bring full multi-modal travel search to all sorts of online services, and if a free option helps speed that process up, all the better. If you prefer, you can still search using the company’s website or via its iPhone app, too.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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