Hottest Indian Startups Review : Nearhop.com

You have to travel to a town, which is not connected, by train or a flight. Only way to reach your destination is by bus. That would be a break journey and you have to hop onto a bus after you are done with a train or a flight journey. How do you find and book your ticket for a flight or train or a bus from one single place? How do you find the various possibilities available to reach a destination B from point A. Nearhop.com is trying to solve that problem.

India is known for its complexity. Traveling in India is no different. Though Indian railways do a tremendous job of covering India, there are places, which can only be reached by bus. Even if you can afford to travel by flight, there is no flight available. With the Indian aviation in doldrums you can expect more flights to be cancelled in the near future to the tier-2 cities. What this startup Nearhop is giving is a choice. You can choose to go directly from City A to City B using the flight or you can choose to hop in between through various modes of transport. The maximum number of hops available is 3.

Started by just one person from Hyderabad, Nearhop has really amazed me by the possibilities. Though there is a lot of work to be done in terms of user interface and the ticket booking facility the very idea that you can check 3 different modes of transport is outright novel.

Nearhop’s algorithm enumerates the list of all possible paths available to reach the destination. It also includes the arrival and departure times, the gap between the hops and the maps. You cannot book your itinerary from Nearhop and you have to go to the respective website to book your tickets. It has over 5000 places in its database and 38000 flights/buses/trains combined. It will also provide the nearest town possible if the chosen town is not available in their database.

Nearhop’s future plans are very promising. It plans to introduce mobile application, which will give local bus and train routes for the important metros. It is also planning to tie-up with the service providers for ticket booking and other services

Nearhop as-is is a very neat tool. But it can use a make-up to the user interface to give the web 2.0 look. It also has to tie-up with other travel portals, which typically cater to their own vertical to complete the process of finding and booking the itinerary. It has a very strong competitor in the form of 90di. How Nearhop deals with the competition and how it scales up to a broader audience is to be determined.

Nearhop has just entered the Tata NEN contest. If you think this startup is hot you can vote for them here. Alternatively you can send an SMS “HOT 596″ to 56767.

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Author: Sriram Vadlamani

Sriram Vadlamni is a IT professional and an avid blogger. He blogs about India business at Indianomics.com and you can follow him on twitter @indianomics (Email: sriram.vadlamani@gmail.com)

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Tagged as: arrival and departure, arrival and departure times, booking facility, flight journey, future plans, India, indian aviation, Indian railways, local bus, mobile application, modes of transport, nearhop, startup, startups, tata nen, ticket booking, train routes, travel, traveling in india, user interface