I decided to put this paragraph first, though I wrote it last. Three cheers to this Nearhop team. I have been sitting with this review for some time now. It took me time to research about the site, and every time I visited, they had something new. So I thought high time I put this up, before they come up with yet another new feature.

How about a vacation covering Kerala and Karnataka? In a given week’s time, do you plan to hop from one exotic locale to another, in combination of buses, trains, and flights, whatever is available, making sure that you don’t miss your transports between the hops? Nearhop.com comes to your rescue.

Nearhop.com is a travel website with an exhaustive database of around 67317 numbers of buses, trains, and flights. The database, compiled meticulously, helps you to search information about availability of bus, train , and flight services from around 6000 places. The site provides an exhaustive list and information about arrival and departure timings; ticket availability, ticket prices and you can even book tickets. One can search based on time lines, i.e. search for a train, which departs exactly 90 minutes after your bus reaches the destination.

Nearhop is not only about interstate or inter-town, you could even find information on local train and bus services, timings, routes and even download route maps. What more? You could download all the local information on your mobile phone too! All you need a Java enabled cell phone. Nearhop’s mobile application allows you to download everything from maps to train timetables and bus routes to any local place within your city. One can even check out ways to reach to the destination in shortest time possible. Plus, you don’t need an internet connection for all this and you can download the software for free!

‘Near Town’ is another interesting feature. The objective is to know about small towns/villages neighboring big ones, and list them on Nearhop. Suppose you belong to a small village in Karnataka near Bangalore, you could add the village name on Nearhop database and give information on how to get there from Bangalore. By doing this your village gets added to Nearhop’s database, and many can benefit from the information. This is something similar to a wiki.

Another Wiki feature on Nearhop is the hotels. As an extended service, they also host information on hotels in different cities; using the wiki format visitors can help correct wrong information.

Everything is great about the site- the idea, the speed, exhaustive database et al. Only thing that doesn’t impress much, is the design. Nearhop is already making waves. A better site design with a neat layout, better font and cool colors would certainly help.