90di- Simple Search for complex travel

Crosspost : vcbytes

90di, a new travel search engine in the already flooded market of online travel sites, stands out because of its unique features. First, it is not a travel agency, it simply searches on various modes of travel and redirects you to the respective booking sites, much similar to ixigo. But the best feature lies in the integration between various modes of travel, bus, train, and flight.

With its simplistic google-like homepage sans any ads (I wonder what their revenue model is), 90 Degree Internet Travel lets you combine all modes of travel between a pair of destinations. The search bar is simple, again like google’s, and one can enter source, destination, dates, and modes of travel in plain English and the powerful parser parses them to generate a list of meaningful search results. Of course you have the form-like search page too.

Another interesting feature is the ‘near search’, which lets you search routes to lesser-known destinations, that do not have an airport, or even a railway station. Once you search for such a destination, 90di gives you a list of close by locations to choose from. These are the much-needed features that the founders of 90di used as the USP for their travel site and will definitely take them far and ahead of competitors.

One improvement that can be done in the inter-mode search is to include the transition time. For example, in Bangalore, a one-hour window between landing at BIAL and boarding a train at Majestic is utterly insufficient. Intra-city travel times can be taken into account to not show such a result.