GoEuro: At Just the Right Time

Just launched today in beta, GoEuro is a travel search website that lets users plan, organize, and compare their trips across air, rail, bus, and auto travel modes. While no more innovative then your typical metasearch tool, this new startup comes along at just the right time.

With the new service travelers can plan their transportation options anywhere in Europe, even in and to small towns and villages across the continent. The service makes for a simple filtering of options for would-be travelers to compare and choose travel modes based on a series of criteria.

Having secured $4 million in seed funding from Battery Ventures and Hasso Plattner Ventures, GoEuro seems all set to redefine the ways in which people figure out their best personal transportation alternatives. Comparison shopping the best possible “linkages”, this just makes good sense if the developers can carry it off. My 1,2,3 preliminary test of the search system follows.

One – It’s refreshingly clear to start using. Input the destinations (even a small town in Germany like ours), add the people traveling, choose the mode (like air below), and bingo!

Aside a glitch in traversing secondary flight search fly.co.uk, which you can see timing out below in the first instance, GoEuro did in fact find what appears to be one of the cheapest flight choices in between Germany and Bucharest. I especially liked how GoEuro reveals each suggested leg of the trip – car to airliner to car to door.

Bottom line for a quick search via GoEuro, I would have saved a bit over €100 euro per person booking via their method. As an added bonus, the flying with Austrian Airlines may or may not be a superior experience to traveling with Pegasus, for instance.

Two – For a beta, GoEuro is about as complete as anyone in the development world could expect at a stage. Although car and bus choices are not so abundant yet (Bucharest was out in my test), the potential is certainly impressive. Switching cities from Bucharest to Copenhagen (a nice drive we’ve made before) the DB Bahn choices appear. Saving fares from €356 euro seem pretty good from here, but I wanted to check bus travel, for a closer comparison – opps! The incompleteness is a lost opportunity cost. Still, the user interface and the organizational structure/technical merit of the tool are there already.

Since we just traveled to Milan via car, my next little mini-test made sense for showing you readers the new startup. Switching over the the “car” section of GoEuro (which I wondered how come on) the same simple and elegant “push button” results appears quickly, this time from Rentalcars.com. The Mecedes C Class with GPS looked perfect as did the price for a week’s driving. When compared with our own Eurocar member affiliation, the Audi A4 at about the same price might be a better choice? Still, GoEuro was lightning fast.

Three – The online travel game may be a bit closer to “over” than most people would like to think. With mobile taking up an ever increasing percentage of looking and booking actions worldwide, the desktop is simply not going to host so many brave new inventive services later on. But for now I guess the question for GoEuro is; “Is your product really needed, really innovative?” My answer here is decidedly “yes” for a couple of reasons. First, travelers (users) need an “all in one” that can decipher the mountain of data at their fingertips. In short, just what GoEuro is – a meta search engine for meta search engines and primary sources. Secondly, what GoEuro has made so far is perfect for smart devices really.

So, I think you have the recipe for further expenditures of GoEuro’s capital in the coming months. Add services and destination coverage, and start banging out a killer app. Hey, do you guys need content providers? Nice work GoEuro.