[tbabej]

Europe has quite a few high-quality, high-speed rail connections. If I may suggest a feature, in order for the tool is to be faithful to its mission, alternative mods of transport could be supported as well.

Personally, I am more than happy to take an overnight train than a short-flight, given the additional overhead of travelling to/from the airport. An overnight train can take you pretty far within continental Europe.

[melx]

That's what I'm going to do this August with my 3yr old as we'll be visiting friends and family etc.

I'd be taking a train to London (about 3h), then EuroStar to Paris (2h 15), then to Berlin (about 8h). Total time ~13 hours.

Flight time for me to Berlin is ~4h, but to get to Airport and the wait for boarding brings it probably close to 8h, but then I can't visit the relatives in Paris that easy.

Actually I don't like flying that much these days (the eco reasons aside).

[riedel]

This is the ideal case. However, I have been involved in quite a bit of European projects and it is not that easy. Last meeting was in Poznan and I could have used the train via Berlin from south Germany, but somehow I have not been able to book any night trains lately and traveling over the day would have taken a whole day of my work week instead of half. Next trip is the other direction to The Hague. I will take the train but last time I had to replan my trip 3 times while traveling due to cancellations and delays. I don't want to fly but I am always totally stressed after long train trips. To a typical meeting people from like 10 countries come in a European research project. Traveling from Germany to Spain or even Greece is not really feasible by train until we get better night train connections (only Austrian rail is actually operating them, but there seems currently no chance to book them)

[makestuff]

I was working on an app as a side project similar to this. Basically each traveler would fill out a form saying I live in X and I have access to car/train/etc. transportation. The idea was to match people and then find a central location for remote teams to meet up. For example, 2 people live in Chicago, 3 in NYC, and one in SF. Where is the best city to meet up; however, I was optimizing on cost.

It turns out several people on HN had similar ideas (Villagers app was one but it seems to be offline now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33344734). I stopped working on it after reading this HN thread where several people linked to various articles like https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-....