It’s good to see startups like Nearhop emerging from India,a web service that actually addresses an core problem using technology as its medium.

Nearhop is an indian travel search engine which aspires to be one-stop destination for any kind of travel.You just need to enter the source location,destination and date of journey & let this system compute all the possible ways of reaching the destination using bus/flight/train with combinations upto 3-hops(stopages).They have over 55000 flights/trains/buses indexed in their growing database.

In India where flights aren’t easily affordable to general public and villages/small towns are in abundance(where modes of commutation aren’t well regulated),such a service can prove very useful for users to parallely compare all the possible ways of commutation and decide which mode of journey should be preferred(after comparing ‘time of journey’ and ‘fare’ ).

In case of ‘bus’ mode where online booking isn’t available yet,Nearhop lists the contact number of concerned travel agents,which helps users book a bus ticket for journey by road.It also shows up your journey path over a map.

Founded by Venkata Rao,an IIT postgrad,who earlier spent few years working with some other startups in Bangalore has not limited his service to just a search engine for inter-state travelling queries.The services go deeper and much broader.

Nearhop Local is a section which lets you find out bus/local train routes of selected cities in India(14 cities covered so far).After trying it out,they appear quite effective to us.

Sometimes Nearhop may have limited or no information to reach a place.In that case,Nearhop Near-towns generates results to the nearest town of that place. The routes from the near towns to the place are referred as “Near Routes”.

They have plans of providing the information on mobiles also wherever it is possible. They have started with city bus and local train routes for 6 cities in India namely Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. The mobile user can download and use the application onto his mobile FREE of cost.They have more plans for expansion in this area in the time to come.

What they still need to do….

• They should list the fare of the mode of commutation as well,which will make it even more easy for the users to compare the different services parallely(to select the most economical mode)
• The aspect of ‘user experience’ hasn’t been prioritized while developing this web service.The team behind this service needs to give special attention to designing aspect of their service to make browsing comfortable

Conclusion

Nearhop can really make out a good business model out of their service,provided they do some strategic tie-ups with with travel service providers.If Nearhop works out on its shortcomings and keeps enriching its database,then it will soon find some VC,funding their concept to take it to the NEXT level.