NearHop.com

Travel aggregation is a crowded market and what’s really needed is travel planning - across the different modes of travel (bus, train and flight)

Hyderbad based, Nearhop is attempting to be the travel planner and computes all the possible ways using bus/ flight/ train with combinations upto 3-hops.

Nearhop claims 5,000 places and has database of 38000 flights/trains/buses. For eg if you give ‘AAA’ as the source and ‘BBB’ as the destination,

NearHop enumerates the list of all direct services from ‘AAA’ to ‘BBB’. It also enumerates the list of all 2-hop paths to reach from ‘AAA’ to ‘BBB’. An example of a 2-hop path is first to reach a station, say ‘CCC’ from ‘AAA’ by flight/train/bus  and from there go to ‘BBB’  by flight/train/bus. 3-hop paths are also enumerated if they are appropriate.

Few features:

• Given a source, destination and date, NearHop creates a travel plan. i.e it computes and enumerates the list of all "possible paths which include arrival time, departure time, fare, number of hops, service details, availability" to reach the destination from the source. A "possible path" can be either direct bus/flight/train  or combination of  the above. 
• Lists the possible paths upto 3-hops.
• Lists the day specific schedules. ie A flight may deptart at 3:00PM on sun, mon and tue and depart at 7:00PM on remaining days.NearHop computes the schedules specific to a day.
• Lists the links to book the tickets.
• Displays timetable of flight, bus and train for each city; shows the map for your journey

NearHop has also created database of bus/local train routes (for Bangalore,Mumbai,Chennai,Delhi,Hyderabad and Kolkata) and one can download the .jar/.jad file from here.

One of the most interesting feature is the local travel part: you can search for local train and bus timings (sort of navigator) and to me, that seems like a very relevant and useful info.

Aggregation of this sort is quite needed in the travel space, and Nearhop really needs to improve on data presentation - the current version seems too complex (and cluttered) to understand.

Do give Nearhop a hop and share your comments.