Green Tickets — how does it work?
Many parts need to work together to provide you with the best overview of the available door-to-door travel options within Europe. In our initial product we will include three travel methods: driving, (public) transit and flying. Each of these methods requires a different procedure.
This post explains our approach to each of these procedures and how we can provide you with the best overview.
Driving
To show you the driving route we use Google Maps. Just as you would use the app or the website yourself, we insert the origin and destination and Google does the magic for us. We include the driving route, so you can compare travel duration, cost and emissions with respect to the other options.
Transit
In order to figure out the transit options a much more integrate system needs to be developed. We need to know all the available busses, trains, trams, etc. within all of Europe! Luckily there are many open source projects (e.g. for the Netherlands and in general) that gather this data and make it publicly available.
However, just showing the itineraries will not allow you to make a decision. You need to know the price and availability of the trains (or busses) as well. For local transit this can sometimes be easily calculated, but for international trains and busses, we need to have access to the back offices of the mobility providers. This is what we are working on right now!
Flights
Sometimes taking an international train or bus isn’t going to cut it. Sometimes taking a train is actually faster than flying. There is only one way to find out: we need to show you the available flights. However, we don’t present you with just stand-alone flights as we only show door-to-door solutions. This requires three steps.
First, we need to find out which airports are near you and your destination. Second, we need to find all available flights for all combinations of those airports. We use the back office of Skyscanner for this. Finally, for each flight that we found, we need to include traveling to and from the airports. This adds additional cost and travel time to the result.
For this last step we include the waiting time before your flight takes of. This is crucial when comparing flights with transit: for most trains you can arrive just a few minutes before it leaves the station, but some airlines require you to arrive 90 minutes before take-off. This gives the train a head start. However, as we don’t have a Hyperloop in Europe just yet, the plane is probably going to catch up at some point.
It really depends on your trip, the time of the year, the availability, your budget, and your personal preferences, which of these travel options is the best one for you. It can be complex to get a good overview of the possibilities, especially if you have to look up all the options on different websites. But with Green Tickets, finding the optimal itinerary will be just a matter of seconds.
Do you want to know more about Green Tickets, follow our progress or be one of the first to test our platform? Sign up for the newsletter on getgreentickets.com.
