That frustration can be productive shows Rachel Armitage, co-founder of Zoombu, a search engine that helps you to find the best way to travel from your home to any destination in Europe. The clever service finds thousands of routes across multiple modes of transportation and picks out the cheapest and quickest route. Users even has the option to search the most carbon friendly end-to-end route.  The site has launched in private alpha;  a good reason to ask Rachel the what, how and why of  Zoombu.

How did you come up with the idea of setting it up?

Zoombu was born from the sheer frustration at the time it takes to search for a trip to Europe. Information about flights, trains, coaches and driving options is currently scattered across many different websites and is very difficult to compare. My co-founder, Alistair Hann, decided that this was a problem that needed solving. He entered the idea of a multi-modal travel search engine into a competition called Idea Idol at Oxford's Said Business School and won.

Alistair and I have been friends since we studied engineering together at Oxford University, where we worked on a number of projects and business plans together. Since Oxford, I have worked in venture capital and as a management consultant and Alistair completed his PhD in artificial intelligence. We knew we could work well together and made a complimentary team, so shortly after he won the competition he asked me to co-found the business with him. Excited by the opportunity, I left my consulting job a few months later to work full time on Zoombu.

What made you decide that it was not just a good idea but also a good business?

Right from the start I knew the pain of searching for trips was very real and shared by many of my friends and colleagues, so I was convinced that that the need was there. I also saw that the online travel market has huge potential; in Europe alone it has grown at an outstanding rate of 41% per year for the past 5 years and reached EUR 49.4 billion in 2007. It is a market that is changing rapidly and new businesses providing differentiated services can be quickly accepted and can thrive. Although this is not a trivial project, after Alistair built the first prototype of the service I was confident that we could build the full search engine. We knew that having a clear way to monetize our service is important for growth and attracting investment and our principle source of revenue is small slices of commission from bookings made as a result of our route recommendations. Like many search businesses, our profitability scales with our volume of users.

What distinguishes the company from others that offer similar services?

There are no service that exists today that allow the user to compare different modes of transport (flights, trains, ferries etc.) in a fully integrated search. We reveal the cost, duration and C02 emissions of the entire route from a traveller's door to his or her end destination in Europe, so unlike other searches, we are not limited to searching between international terminals. We offer a fully transparent service, so we don't mark up component prices, and we are impartial, meaning we do not rig our search results to place transport providers paying higher rates of commission at the top of the results (many other travel sites do this). We also personalise the search so a user can see routes specific to their particular travel preferences.

How did you fund your business?
We were one of the companies to take part in Seedcamp 2008 and that validation helped us to raise a small amount of seed funding, which will allow us to take our prototype to a functional beta service. We keep a very low burn rate as we are bootstrapping heavily and we don't spend any money unless we have to!

Tell me one experience you had in setting it up that others can learn from?
When you plan out the development of your product it's important to understand the 'big picture'; to know your market, competition and have a reasonable idea of the costs and time involved with reaching certain milestones. However, it's also vital to get stuck in the detail as quickly as possible to learn where your real sticking points are and whether your estimates are reasonable. Don't underestimate the power of prototyping and involving real users early on.

What is the next step you plan to take with your company?
We currently have a private alpha service, which finds the best way to travel from door to destination within limited European countries. We are adding functionality and data to make our search more comprehensive and we are beginning to open this up to more users and use their valuable feedback to shape the product. We hope to open up our service to the public in late summer of this year. In the meantime, we invite people interested in trialling our alpha to sign up for an invitation via our website!