Guest Post: Why everyone talks about multimodal travel, but almost nobody actually sells it

Noam Toister, CEO of Travelier, says it's not the technology...

Multimodal and connected trip has become one of the travel industry's favourite words. Every conference has a panel about it. Every strategy presentation includes it. Every major travel company agrees that the holy grail is connecting flights, trains, buses, ferries and transfers into one seamless journey. 

Yet if you actually try to book that journey, you quickly discover something interesting. True multimodal remains surprisingly rare. Although travel technology has mastered comparing different transport options, the booking experience remains fragmented - leaving travellers to manually juggle separate flight and ferry tickets, tight transfers, and conflicting cancellation policies. While the journeys themselves may be multimodal, the purchasing process is not; true value will only be unlocked when platforms step up to absorb that backend complexity so travellers don't have to. 

The challenge is not the technology. It is the underlying infrastructure

People often assume multimodal is a technology problem. It is not. Technology is only one layer. The real challenge is infrastructure. 

Air travel has spent decades building global standards for schedules, distribution, reservations and ticketing. Ground and sea transportation evolved very differently. Instead of a relatively standardized ecosystem, it consists of thousands of independent operators, each with different booking systems, pricing models, operational procedures and customer support processes. Some are highly digital. Others still operate with little or no digital infrastructure. 

Connecting those businesses into one customer experience is fundamentally different from displaying them on the same search page. Aggregation helps people discover transport. Multimodal takes responsibility for the journey. That distinction is where most of the complexity lives.

Southeast Asia forced us to solve the problem first 

At 12Go, 14 years of transporting millions of travelers by air, ground, and sea taught us that Southeast Asia simply doesn't allow thinking in individual transport modes 

Many of the region's most popular destinations cannot be reached by plane alone. Getting from Bangkok to Koh Phangan is not a flight. It is a flight, a transfer and a ferry. The same is true for destinations across Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, where flights are often only the first leg of a much longer journey. 

We realized early that travelers were not only looking for more transport options. They were looking for someone to connect the journey for them. That required us to build far more than a marketplace. It meant building the operational infrastructure behind the booking, so multiple independent operators could feel like one continuous journey. 

Today, what began as a necessity in Southeast Asia is becoming increasingly relevant in other parts of the world, as travelers expect the same uninterrupted booking experience regardless of how many transport modes their journey involves. 

What our data says about Multimodal travel in Southeast Asia 

This year alone, travelers have completed more than 340,000 multimodal bookings through 12Go. 

Flight and ferry packages have nearly quadrupled year over year. More complex combinations involving buses, flights, ferries and transfers continue to grow across the platform, while three mode journeys are becoming increasingly common. 

Those numbers are encouraging. But they are not the most interesting part. What matters is what they reveal. Once the complexity of planning those journeys begins to disappear, travellers naturally start combining transport modes into one booking. That changes the conversation. The question is no longer whether people want multimodal travel. It is whether the industry is ready to deliver it. 

Travelers care about the end-to-end journeys, not individual transport modes

The travel industry organizes itself around products. Flights. Ferries. Buses. Trains. Transfers. Travelers never have.They want to reach Koh Tao. They want to spend a weekend on an island or explore a national park that happens to require multiple modes of transport. Transport is simply the infrastructure connecting people to experiences. 

That may sound like a subtle distinction, but it changes how multimodal should be built. If the customer thinks in journeys, the booking experience should too. 

The opportunity goes far beyond convenience

This is not just about making booking easier. It is about making more of the world accessible. Many of the destinations that the governments and tourism boards are encouraging travellers to visit do not have international airports. Some do not have airports at all. 

They rely entirely on buses, ferries, trains and transfers to connect visitors beyond the major gateway cities. If the travel industry wants to support regional tourism, dispersal and access to secondary destinations, then multimodal becomes more than a product feature. It becomes enabling infrastructure. 

The easier those journeys become to book, the easier it becomes for travellers to explore places they may never have considered before. 

The best multimodal experience is the one nobody notices. 

For years, multimodal has been presented as the future of travel. I suspect that one day we will stop using the word altogether. Nobody talks about booking a multi airline itinerary. Nobody talks about a multi hotel stay. 

They simply book a trip. 

The same should happen with multimodal. The technology should disappear into the background. The complexity should remain invisible. The traveller should simply choose where they want to go and trust that the journey will work. 

Because in the end, travellers do not care whether part of the journey happens by plane, ferry, train or bus. They care about reaching the destination they imagined in the first place. When the industry stops thinking in transport modes and starts thinking in complete journeys, multimodal will stop being a trend. It will simply become how travel works.