Travellers like to see their hotel room before booking, so it makes sense that they might like to see what their mode of transport looks like too.
That was the thinking behind Rome2Rio’s introduction this July of transportation images into its search results.
A few months later the multi-modal travel search engine has shared some insights into how users are engaging with the images, and the result is that they are engaging – 750,000 transport images viewed each week, with the business hoping that by the end of the year this will have risen to 1.5 million.
Bus and ferry images are more popular than trains, it found, because “buses and ferries vary greatly in comfort and quality and the market is more fragmented with many smaller operators”.
But the runaway success has been images from its ride-sharing partners BlaBlaCar and carpooling.com “because long-distance rideshare is still a relatively new concept and users are keen to learn more about the type of experience they’ll have.”
Users also like the reasurrance of seeing pictures of ticketing machines.
Without entering into the realm of becoming a trainspotter dotcom, Rome2Rio has found a different way to engage visitors to its site.
Factor in the growth to come in ride-sharing, the expansion of the rail network across Europe and ongoing deregulation of coach travel in major markets such as Germany and you can see why Rome2Rio is so excited by this development.
