Journey planner

A journey planner (or trip planner) is a specialised electronic search engine used to find the best journey between two points often intermodally. Journey planners have been widely used in the travel industry since the 1970s by booking agents accessed through a user interface on a computer terminal, and to support call centre agents providing public transport information.

The advent of the "DIY travel agent"-approach enabled by the popularization of the Internet has led to the success of the self-service browser-based on-line intermodal public transport route planners such as Rome2rio, Google Transit and FromAtoB.com. Many modern journey planners combine the principle of a journey planner with the aspects of discovery shopping for accommodation and activities and price comparison for all aspects of planning a journey. A journey planner may be used in conjunction with ticketing and reservation systems, or just to provide schedule information.

A journey planner finds one or more suggested journeys between an origin and a destination. Searches may be optimised on different criteria, for example fastest, shortest, least changes, cheapest. They may be constrained for example to leave or arrive at a certain time, to avoid certain waypoints, etc.

The origin and destination may be specified as geospatial coordinates, named topographical places (e.g. 'Timperley', 'Scunthorpe', 'Grimsby' ), Points of Interest e.g. 'British Museum', or names or identifiers of points of access to public transport such as bus stops, stations, airports or ferry ports. A location finding process will typically first resolve the origin and destination into the nearest known nodes on the transport network in order to compute a journey plan over its data set of known journeys.

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Wikipedia