There are a lot of travel search engines around, most of which feature some mix of flights, hotels and car hire. And some of them are excellent like Hipmunk.com and Skypicker.com. But they do have limitations, and the biggest is usually the fact that they don’t offer alternative transport modes such as train, car or bus travel.

GoEuro is a new online travel search service which does offer alternative transport modes, and it’s all wrapped in a very nice interface indeed. The basic search results page offers up a nice clear mix of a small map, with prices, schedules and times nicely set out for fast browsing. But the cool part are the tabs, which let you instantly access alternatives for the same route, such as driving a car, taking a train or using the bus.

In practice we found it a cinch to get a very quick overview of how much it would cost to get around Europe via the different services, although we notice that the bus section seems to be a little sparse at the moment, probably reflecting the new nature of the site. The service copes with multiple Euro languages and also different currencies (including USD).

We did, however, find question with a few of their calculations. They omit highway tolls and ferry costs on driving options, and seem to make rather strange assumptions in terms of travel to and from smaller European airport destinations. So for instance, they assume you’ll travel by private car from a small airport to a destination 2 hours away, whereas you’re more like to hire a car, or take a train or bus. They do note these factors in the results though, so it’s definitely early teething problems, the timetable and pricing databases will eventually no doubt be improved.

All in all though, it’s a very nice first effort, and we look forward to the time when the whole data set is complete, and you can accurately (and reliably) plan an A to Z journey across multiple transport modes at the click of a button. Definitely worth a bookmark.