Direct Ferries, a UK-based ferry ticketing platform, has launched a search and discovery app inside ChatGPT, making more than 4,000 ferry routes across 300-plus operators searchable through conversational AI.
The app is accessible through ChatGPT’s standard free experience where the service is available, though OpenAI says app availability can vary by region, plan and partner restrictions.
The launch brings ferry inventory into the same ChatGPT app ecosystem already used by travel companies including Expedia and Booking.com.
OpenAI introduced apps in ChatGPT in October 2025, saying the Apps SDK lets developers build interactive services that users can call by name inside a conversation. OpenAI said the SDK is built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that connects ChatGPT to external tools and data.
Navigating a competitive and fragmented market
Direct Ferries’ entry does not make ferry search entirely new to ChatGPT. Omio launched a ChatGPT app in April covering trains, buses, flights and ferries across more than 3,000 partners, while Ferryhopper launched what it called the first dedicated ferry booking app in the ChatGPT Apps Directory, using real-time data from 190-plus ferry operators.
The company says no other platform in ChatGPT offers ferry inventory at this level, with coverage across every inhabited continent and routes ranging from short island crossings to intercontinental services. It also says it serves about 5 million passengers globally each year and aggregates more than 4,000 routes across 300-plus ferry operators.
Niall Walsh, CEO of Direct Ferries, believes the launch addresses a fundamental industry bottleneck. “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,” Walsh said.
Walsh added, “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.”
Direct Ferries is positioning the launch against a fragmented ferry distribution market. In the launch material, Direct Ferries CTO Chris Corderoy said ferry operators use different systems, formats, APIs and 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,” Corderoy said. He added that the server resolves the complexity of global ferry travel at the source, giving agentic search platforms “clean, accurate, real-time inventory across 4,000 routes globally” without having to manage the underlying fragmentation themselves.
Expanding beyond consumer search to AI distribution
Direct Ferries says the same infrastructure behind the ChatGPT app will be made available through Direct Ferries Connect, allowing travel companies to add ferry search to their own AI-powered products.
The ChatGPT launch therefore extends Direct Ferries’ existing aggregation role into AI distribution, rather than serving only as a consumer travel feature.
The user flow mirrors other ChatGPT travel apps. Travelers describe a route in natural language, see route options and live pricing inside ChatGPT, then click through to complete the booking on Direct Ferries.
Ferryhopper describes a similar conversation-to-checkout model, while Tripadvisor’s ChatGPT app lets users compare hotel deals before tapping through to Tripadvisor or a partner site to finish the transaction.
The commercial impact of conversational travel
The ferry market is large enough to make visibility in AI travel search commercially relevant. An Oxford Economics study commissioned by Interferry found that ferries carried at least 4.27 billion passengers and at least 373 million vehicles in 2019, and estimated that the global ferry industry could have supported about $60 billion in GDP and 1.1 million jobs that year.
For travel sellers, the immediate change is discoverability. As ChatGPT and other assistants become starting points for trip planning, ferry operators connected through aggregators can surface inside conversational search without building their own AI integrations.
Operators outside those aggregation channels may remain harder to find when travelers compare routes, schedules and prices through AI assistants.
Direct Ferries said further AI-led developments are planned as it expands agent-driven and AI-powered travel search.