We are happy to announce that routeRANK has gained the support of Simone Niggli-Luder, the 17-time world champion in orienteering. Drawing the parallel to her sports she confirms that “routeRANK spares travellers orienteering in public transport”.
Travelling from London to Lausanne, for example, there are thousands of possible routes: by air through multiple departure airports and into multiple arrival airports in Geneva, Bern-Belp or Zürich-Kloten, with multiple airlines connecting them, often multiple times a day, and with multiple airport transfer options for each of them; travelling by train all the way or driving by car are additional possibilities. Comparing them in terms of cost and environmental impact, as well as – crucially for orienteering athletes – overall travel time is tedious and consumes lots of planning effort.
As a first step, the routeRANK widget has already been installed on Simone Niggli-Luder’s homepage, with the default destination set to her hometown Münsingen. Simone’s testimonial can be found on routeRANK’s website.
Incidentally Lausanne, where routeRANK is headquartered, will be host to the World Orienteering Championships next summer. routeRANK hopes to be able to help athletes participating in the event, so that they easily get there in the first place and can focus their energy and skills on the actual competition.
On a different topic, the Swiss ICT journal featured routeRANK in its early October issue. For more details, please refer to our press page. routeRANK was also included in the Swiss Top 100 startups 2011. We currently show on position 53 among the 200,000 or so startups since 2006.
Last but not least, we have worked on further improvements and the fine tuning of routeRANK’s flight filtering, so as to show a selection of routes that is even more relevant to the user. As usual, this takes into account the different priorities and trade-offs, such as the cost, travel time, changeovers and carbon emissions. Please give it a try on your upcoming trips and let us have your thoughts. Your opinion and feedback are always appreciated.