4,000 routes, 300 operators on ChatGPT
Direct Ferries has launched a ferry-focused search and discovery experience inside ChatGPT. The aggregator is making more than 4,000 routes operated by over 300 ferry operators available within ChatGPT across every inhabited continent. Travellers describe their journey in natural language, view options and live fares, then complete the booking on the Direct Ferries platform.
By joining ChatGPT’s apps, Direct Ferries is exposing, through a standardised connection, the company’s global inventory to AI platforms and conversational assistants. The building block is also offered B2B under the Direct Ferries Connect brand (in reality a redirect to the app hosted by ChatGPT), to power AI-driven travel search products with real-time availability and pricing information.
API continuity
The service aims to address the ferry market’s fragmentation, characterised by hundreds of operators, heterogeneous systems and varying levels of data access. While air and rail have long offered standardised interfaces and integrations with AI assistants, sea crossings have remained largely invisible in such tools.
“Ferry is one of the most fragmented travel markets in the world. Thousands of routes, hundreds of operators, most of them historically offline and impossible to search in one place. We've spent 25 years fixing that, aggregating global supply into a single inventory that no individual operator could ever build. Bringing that into ChatGPT is the next step in the same journey we’ve been on since day one,” said Niall Walsh, CEO of Direct Ferries.
The company presents this step as a logical extension of its direct-connect work following the development of a standardised API. Chris Corderoy, CTO of Direct Ferries, added: “The key challenge with ferry market data has always been the fragmentation, with no defined industry standard for integration. Ferry operators run different systems, different formats, different APIs and different levels of real-time availability. What we've built with Direct Ferries is that global standard, first with our Connect API and now with our latest MCP Server interface it resolves all the complexity of global ferry travel at source, so that any Agentic search platform connecting to it gets clean, accurate, real-time inventory across 4,000 routes globally without the need to handle any of the underlying fragmentation itself. This allows for real-time conversational pricing and availability for global ferry travel.”
The timing appears favourable. Globally, ferry travel represented around 4.3 billion passengers before Covid, according to the Interferry association, and remains a vital link for many islands, coastlines and communities. The promise of unified search, from short island hops to intercontinental routes, could accelerate the shift to digital channels and encourage intermodality by better integrating sea legs with itineraries that combine rail, air and road.
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