A recent article by routeRANK founder and Chairman Jochen Mundinger on Tnooz revisited the evolution of the full travel story concept since its inception in 2006.
Considering both business and consumer travel it looked at possible reasons why this had not been developed earlier (technology challenge, data challenge, sequential means of transport often competing in parallel on other trips). Linking with findings of recent industry reports, the article then covered routeRANK’s achievements and our multi-modal, multi-criteria door-to-door travel route planning solutions as well as other initiatives inspired by it, pointing out that a widely accepted terminology is still missing. It thus triggered an active discussion which led to a number of suggestions (24 comments – thank you again to everyone who participated!). The following is a summary of the terms from the article and the comments, more structured and with some additional comparison.
- end-to-end journey (E2E):
nicely captures the door-to-door journey and implies multi-modality, although not necessarily the multi-criteria / multi-priority aspect (i.e. costs taken to include overall travel time, carbon footprint productivity and others as well as overall travel fare); in business travel the term already has another meaning, referring to the process.
- door-to-door journey (D2D):
explicitly captures the door-to-door journey and implies multi-mode travel, although not necessarily the multi-criteria aspect and more general notion of cost.
- address-to-address search:
explicitly captures the door-to-door journey and implies multi-mode travel, although not necessarily the multi-criteria aspect and more general notion of cost.
- from A to B trip:
captures the flexibility in the types of departure and destination locations (e.g. arbitrary street addresses in addition to hubs such as airports or train stations), although not necessarily the multi-criteria aspect and the more general travel cost; might be perceived as somewhat vague
- point-to-point travel (P2P):
captures the flexibility in the types of departure and destination locations as ‘from A to B’, however might actually be interpreted as ‘point’ in the sense of a hub as opposed to ‘address’.
- joined-up travel:
nicely captures the multiple travel segments and implies multi-modality, although not necessarily the multi-criteria aspect and general trip cost
- entire route planning:
nicely captures the door-to-door route and implies multi-modality, although not necessarily the multi-criteria aspect and the more general travel cost; might be perceived as somewhat vague
- total trip management (TTM):
nicely captures the door-to-door and multi-modal travel aspects as well as the multi-criteria and general trip cost; might be perceived as pertaining to managed corporate travel only.
- second generation travel search:
an open term not conveying meaning like most of the others in this list that thus might require even wider acceptance and use to be established; might be perceived as pertaining to travel meta-search only.
- multi-modal travel/multi-mode travel (with its variations inter-modal, co-modal):
nicely covers the different means of transport and their combinations and implies the door-to-door journey to some extent, although not necessarily the multi-criteria aspect and more general notion of cost.
- holistic trip planning:
nicely captures the door-to-door journey and multi-modality as well as the multi-criteria aspect and general notion of travel cost (including time, productivity and carbon footprint as well)
Whereas in managed corporate travel total trip management (TTM) makes perfect sense, in a general context holistic travel is our new favorite term. Like it?
