Zoombu

» see zoombu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

zoombu never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a UK-coded travel product built around a UK problem: getting from an actual house in south london to an actual hotel in barcelona, when the answer involves a taxi to gatwick plus a low-cost flight plus a metro at the other end. the kind of route the european low-cost boom made cheap but not easy to plan. in ankara during those years the trip abstraction was still airport-to-airport. turkish airlines was the default and no consumer product tried to model the surface transfer at either end.

alistair hann and rachel armitage started zoombu around 2008 out of oxford. they won the university's saïd business school venture fund in 2009 and were seedcamp finalists in 2008. the private beta ran from mid-2009 and the public site launched in march 2010, based in south-west london. the pitch was door-to-door: you typed your starting address and your destination address, and zoombu searched hundreds of carriers to build multi-modal itineraries that combined flights with trains or ferries with taxis, with filters for total time and estimated carbon footprint.

skyscanner acquired zoombu on 17 january 2011. hann and armitage moved to skyscanner's edinburgh headquarters to run senior technical and marketing roles. gareth williams, skyscanner's ceo, said at announcement that "there are more ways to get around than flights only," which was the whole zoombu bet compressed into a soundbite. the consumer zoombu.com site stayed live for a while as a testbed. by may 2012 it was gone. the first data set skyscanner integrated was rail travel.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tech ~

the interesting engineering problem was itinerary composition across carriers who did not want to talk to each other. flight aggregators were already a solved problem by 2009. train APIs were partial. ferries were mostly PDFs. taxis had no fare API worth the name. zoombu built an internal graph that could route across whatever surface it could reach, then rank the resulting options by the multi-dimensional filter the user cared about. the output was a list of door-to-door itineraries with a total time and a total price per option.

the site did not book tickets. it linked out to each supplier. this was the correct choice for the moment because the booking-side integrations would have taken years to reach coverage. it was also the reason the consumer product had a ceiling. every ticket sale was a redirect that skyscanner could not directly monetize.

~ the skyscanner arc ~

skyscanner in 2011 was a pure flight search engine growing into europe's biggest metasearch player. the strategic problem was that "cheapest flight from A to B" is a local maximum. you actually want "cheapest way from A to B," which sometimes involves not flying. zoombu had built the graph that could answer the harder question. buying the team was faster than rebuilding it.

the integration path was slow. skyscanner shipped rail search in the UK first, then expanded across europe over several years, then added car hire and ground transport later. the door-to-door full-multi-modal pitch never made it back into skyscanner's consumer product in the form zoombu had shipped it. the graph engineering survived. the user-facing story got flattened into standard tabs.

~ the funny part ~

the second-order irony is that door-to-door routing arrived through uber and google maps a few years later, and neither of them called it door-to-door. uber gave you the last mile and google maps built the multi-modal graph inside its own maps product. by 2016 typing your home address and a destination address into google maps returned a walking-plus-transit-plus-taxi itinerary better than zoombu's, without ever calling it a travel search.

the actual door-to-door layer got built. it just did not need to be a separate product. zoombu had the correct idea three years too early for the phone-plus-maps stack that eventually made it invisible infrastructure.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »