Benefits Door to door timetable information (from starting point to destination, including local transport as well as long-distance railway or airline transport), calculation of total travel times, information about fares and links to additional important local information sources - these are modules of the EU-Spirit service that bring cross-border travelling by public transport to an unprecedented level of comfort and convenience for end users and intermediate customers. Door-to-door travel information used to be available when starting point and destination are located in the same area only. Most attempts to overcome these information gaps are based on setting up central data bases where all data of different transport operators is stored. However, these systems provide many disadvantages: User friendliness: the user has only access to this data when contacting the operator of the central travel information system directly; Costs and accuracy: the maintenance of data is time consuming and difficult to handle because each time table change in any local system has to be integrated in the central data base immediately in order to avoid to give information that is out-of-date; Openness: all systems joining this system have to use the same algorithms. Via the European travel information service EU-Spirit, these problems are able to be solved by combining information from different services and generating continuous itineraries. EU-Spirit is not an independent system but is based on crosslinking local, regional, and national travel information systems. Therefore, EU-Spirit is only involved when the customer needs to use more than one travel planner. That is, for instance, when a customer does not only want to travel within a regional transport service area or between two main stations but instead needs an itinerary from one local stop to another local stop which are located in different regions. The itineraries cover all kinds of public transport from different suppliers (e.g. local bus/tram/rail as well as long-distance rail transport). The EU-Spirit approach is based on the connection of existing time table services. Travel itinerary information is created by composing information of all participating services via open interfaces and harmonised meta information. Optimising techniques are used when searching for continuous itineraries in order to best meet the customer's demand. These benefits of EU-Spirit can be summarised as follows: All necessary technical preconditions needed are established to upgrade existing local and national timetable information systems of single operators to a service product with international scope. Advantage: It offers integrated door-to-door-travel information and contains all information which a user may require or an operator would like to offer; All information is provided via one customer front end Reasonable short response times are provided which are not prolonged by long search and information integration procedures according to the software architecture; Simple and easy to use website structures or one-click-links are provided. Advantage: They skip the complicated, time wasting search procedures to be done by the Internet users; A considerable added value potential is provided either in form of saved time and/or cost or in form of service offered to the customer; A simple and easy core technology is provided which can be extended in terms of functionality, spatial coverage and service level.
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