Routofy is a travel-planning engine, helping you decide the best travel option available for your next trip in just one click. Ronak, Akash and Abhishek came up with the idea of Routofy in their hostel room in IIT Delhi. "It all started when I got this opportunity to spend a whole semester in France under IIT Delhi semester exchange programme. During this time, my top priority was to travel across Europe. I ended up travelling to almost 12 countries. I realized that so much needs to be done to just figure out a suitable travel option to a destination, given the mind-boggling number of options available with constantly changing prices & availability and complicated schedules.", says Ronak.
How we generally plan our trip after deciding on the destination?
- Open multiple tabs to check for cost and availability of flights/trains/buses
- Check for alternative options incase direct was not available
- Optimize the choices on price, duration, comfort
"When I came back to India, I realized that the it’s even more complex here given the connectivity and availability issues.", said Ronak.
Routofy assures us that we don’t need to spend a whole day doing this. "Our in-house algorithm, a multi-modal route planner, first finds each and every possible path (both direct and indirect) via different cities across all modes. Then all these paths are being filtered by according to various constraints and heuristics to give only realistic paths. This was about the technology working at the core to get the most relevant results.", they say. With Routofy, you can seamlessly search and compare the time, duration and price of various transport options - ranging from trains and flights to buses, and travelling with your own car or taking a cab.
We found the way Routofy showed its results very interesting and different. They have a unique way of rating called WOW ratings. "A lot of times, people don’t want the cheapest option or the fastest option (that may be too expensive), they want something in the middle, basically that gives them the best value for money, which we call the WOW factor, that takes into account various factors like price, duration, comfort, number of stops for a particular itinerary.", they explained.
[caption id="attachment_92905" align="aligncenter" width="700"]
Founders of Routofy - Ronak, Akash & Abhishek (in random order)[/caption]All the options, which are by default sorted on WOW ratings, are displayed on an easy to read and intuitive timeline so that you quickly gain an overview of your available travel options. Every travel option is represented by a box. The start position of the box gives the departure time and the length, their duration. This way you can easily compare all possible connections at a glance, comfortably customize search results to match your preferences and find the best connections.
Based out of Tlabs FilmCity, Noida they have very recently taken out a pre-launch version with almost all flights trains and buses running in India. They are in the process of integrating cabs hence making it a complete solution. Their main focus will be on the product and increasing our coverage in the near future. The ease by which you get the most suitable result will surely increase their users.
"Find the best option to travel in just one click- that's how we say it and that too options or ways you've never thought of before, with exact schedules and latest prices on that day. Our results page gives you at one place all your options with every information you need before deciding your travel option to a destination, be it a metro city or a small hill station.", they added.
As a message for entrepreneurs, they quoted "The fool didn’t know it was impossible and went ahead and did it." Don't just give up there would be a lot of unanswered questions in the beginning but with time you will be able to tackle them.
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