INTEGRA Portal Development

The INTEGRA web portal aims to help travellers to prepare their journey and to make them confident on the different ways to reach the main interest places in their destination cities using collective transport modes.

When a traveller wants to go from a small town in Cantabria to another small town in Scotland, he or she has generally to look through different information systems for the various possible transport modes.

Although main air connections are generally clearly identified it is quite often a slow and boring process trying first to find the travel companies, then to connect trains/ flights/ coaches between various terminals and hubs. Too often this ends up either with people using a car (taxi, renting,…) or staying in the main cities.

INTEGRA portal changes this approach. All (collective) travel modes to reach an INTEGRA city are identified and the links between INTEGRA cities are recorded.

So, if the travel requires a train, then a coach or a bus to go from the arrival regional hub to the final destination, the information about all possible transport providers will be given to the customer as well as the duration of the trip, the main characteristics of the journey and the links to the transport operators websites to access updated and more detailed schedules.

Local specific transport information is also made available to the user like the ticketing organisation, the ways to subscribe for bike or car sharing, the seasonal opportunities, etc. And of course, the collective transport routes to the main places of interest of the area (touristic or business) are mentioned.

The INTEGRA web portal www.integra-travel.eu will be officially launched during the transnational forum organised by START in Lisbon, on the 27th and 28th October 2011.

The portal has been developed by the Engineering School for Industrial Systems (EIGSI) from La Rochelle with the input of all partners and in close cooperation with ISEL - School of Engineering, Lisbon Polytechnic Institute.

The Integra portal provides global multilingual information on:

• How to reach a “gate” of a city/ region, then the city centre with collective transport
• How to use the different transport modes available in the city/region
• Where are the main places of interest (tourist, business, culture, education,..) and how to reach them using collective modes of transport

The main challenge of such a website is obviously the reliability and the accuracy of the travel information. This relies on INTEGRA cities which control the quality of the information regarding their connections to other cities.

To ensure high quality information, the portal will be interfaced to the regional/ local journey planners, be based on the cooperation with Regional/local transport Authorities and open to a ‘collaborative approach’ (Web 2.0 approach).

The customers (registered or not) will be able to suggest alternative routes and transport modes. Such suggestions will have to be validated by INTEGRA cities.

Contact of the Activity leader:

Mr. Xavier Detappe (Xavier.detappe@eigsi.fr)