Scope

This document briefly describes one of the products of Nearhop, “Nearhop - Travel Planner”.

Problem

Travel plan is known to be a complex task. The traveler needs to visit many websites or has to make many calls to plan the journey. The burden from the traveler will be alleviated if there exists a tool to plan the journey and book tickets at the same time. The problem lies in finding all the possible ways from the origin to the destination.

Existing Solutions

There exists some tools used by some meta search engines. However when it comes to large data set their search is limited finding direct paths only. There exists no commerical tool to compute the route with bus, flight and train combinations.

Nearhop – Travel Planner

“Nearhop – Travel Planner” is first of its kind in computing the paths using buses/flights/trains with combinations upto 3-change overs. Following are the advantages with our tool. One can directly verify al the the following points from a self-demonstration at http://www.nearhop.com.

• Computes all the possible ways using bus/ flight/ train with combinations upto 3- hops (change overs).
• Computes all the possible ways using bus/ flight/ train with combinations upto 3- hops (change overs).
• Computes day sepcific schedules. For eg. A train may run only on specific days or a flight may depart at 3 PM on monday and departs at 7 PM on other days. “Nearhop – Travel Planner” computes routes specific to a day.
• Tested on a very big database covering 70000 flights/buses/trains and 6000 places.
• An engine using this planner is made available to public and got good response from people.
• Very good performance in terms of speed.
• Low cost solution
• Scalability: The tool is designed in such a way that size of the database has minimal impact on the scalability
• Easy to integrate new schedules and update the database without disrupting the functionality of the server
• Integrate other information like fares very easily.
• Easily extendable.
• Independent of the data set.

Use cases

• This tool can be used in interactive voice response systems to compute the information required for the user.
• The competetion is very high in travel search or OTA (Online Travel Agent) market. This tool can really bring a value addition to travel search engines or online ticketing booking websites.
• This tool can be fine tuned for other applications like computing the paths using city buses and local trains.