From university project to live product: Routavio plans door-to-door trips that combine flights, trains, buses and ferries

I'm Halil Çınar from Istanbul, the founder and sole developer of Routavio, an independent multimodal journey planner that began as my MSc graduation project at Sabancı University.

The idea came from my own travels. I've been to more than 50 countries, mostly in Europe, and when visiting friends or organising trips I kept running into the same problem. Flight search engines are good at getting you to an airport, but what happens when your actual destination is a smaller city, a coastal town, or somewhere without its own airport? Finding the flight was easy. Working out the rest of the journey meant searching trains, buses and ferries separately and piecing it together myself.

Routavio (routavio.com) brings flights, trains, buses and ferries together so travellers can compare complete door-to-door journeys, not just the leg to the airport. For example, someone travelling to Colmar can explore routes that combine a flight to a nearby airport with an onward rail connection, rather than stopping the search at the airport.

What makes Routavio different

• Searches every airport near your final destination
• Finds the onward train, bus or ferry from each one
• Combines several transport modes in a single route
• Checks transfer times so connections are realistic
• Labels each price as live, cached or estimated
• Built on open operator timetables (GTFS)
• Wind Drift plans a trip from your own description

Routavio doesn't sell tickets, make bookings or process payments. Travellers complete their bookings directly with the relevant operator or provider.

Flights are covered worldwide, while ground and ferry connections currently focus mainly on Europe and Türkiye.

I'd love for travel professionals to try it on a journey you know well and tell me what works, what's missing, and how you approach the challenge of connecting fragmented transport networks.

Thanks for your feedback and comments!