One question, answered end to end
Every comparison site answers part of the journey. Parking sites price car parks. Rail sites price trains. Nobody prices the whole thing — including how you reach the station, how you get home at midnight, and what the terminal forecourt costs when you get there.
Screenshots are the running app on live data, not mockups. Routing, transit, TfL and coach fares and the London charges are live; prices still marked EST are our own calculations, and parking inventory is the one source not yet connected.
What falls out of comparing the whole journey
Gatwick charges £10 to drop someone at the terminal. Manchester charges £5.50.
Every one of these airports also has a free alternative — park in Long Stay and take the shuttle. Both facts are published, on seven different sites, in seven different formats. Nobody puts them side by side.
Verified against each airport’s own drop-off page on 27 August 2026: Heathrow £7, Gatwick £10, Stansted £10, Luton £7, Manchester £5.50, Birmingham £7, Edinburgh £8.50. Each airport states its own free option on its own page — this is a comparison problem, not a concealment one.
No UK airport publishes an advance parking price.
Gatwick shows only a booking widget. Heathrow publishes drive-up gate rates of £271.20 a week that nobody pre-booking actually pays.
Checked on the same date. Heathrow lists £46.80 for the first day and £37.40 per 24 hours thereafter, and recommends its own quote widget instead. This is why an inventory feed is the missing piece rather than a nice-to-have: the prices exist, but not in any form a comparison can read.
The leg nobody models
Journey planners assume you walk to the station. At 04:00 with two suitcases you do not. Underway prices that leg explicitly — walk, taxi, lift, or drive and park — in both directions, because the realistic answer at 04:00 is not the realistic answer at 22:30.
Changing it re-prices the whole option in place — and the parking, fares and forecourt charges it draws on each carry their own provenance.
One flight number is enough
Type the flight number and the departure time, date and terminal fill themselves in. Give the return flight too and it reads the arrival time — the one thing nobody remembers and the thing that decides whether the journey home exists at all.
The terminal is not a label. Heathrow’s are 4.6 miles apart and the app routes to the one on your boarding pass, so the price you see is the price of your journey rather than the airport’s average.
Schedules resolve about 185 days ahead and carry the terminal that whole way. Where the data is a published schedule rather than a tracked aircraft, the app says so — terminals can still be reassigned.
What is built
-
Live routing, and live fares where anyone publishes them
Driving and public transport routing from Google, with real services, operators and interchanges. TfL prices London journeys on its own network — Bank to Heathrow Terminal 5 is £5.90, not a guess. Coach fares are parsed from the DfT’s Bus Open Data Service: RailAir Woking to Heathrow is £15.00, where our own estimate had been £12.00.
-
London charges, by route rather than by postcode
The congestion charge and ULEZ are applied on whether the road actually crosses the zone, not on where the traveller lives — so driving from Woking to Stansted through central London pays, and the same trip round the M25 does not. Charging hours are modelled too: a 09:30 flight means leaving before the charge starts.
-
Flight number in, terminal out
One flight number fills in the departure time, the terminal and — from the return flight — the arrival time. Schedules resolve about 185 days ahead and carry the terminal the whole way, which is further out than anyone books airport parking.
-
Terminal-level routing at Heathrow
Heathrow’s terminals are 4.6 miles and 8 minutes apart by road, and which one is nearest changes with the direction you approach from — Terminal 5 from the south-west, Terminal 2 from the east. Routing to the terminal rather than the airport moves a taxi fare by £22. Gatwick and Manchester were measured too; their terminals are a few hundred metres apart, so there is no distinction to make and we do not invent one.
-
Six transport modes, one screen
Train, coach, taxi, lift and drop-off, off-site parking and meet & greet — priced door to terminal, in both directions, and ranked on cost, journey time and hassle.
-
Every figure declares its source
Each number is marked verified, calibrated, live or assumed, and the app shows you which. An unchecked estimate does not get to look like a published price — and where a source states a floor rather than an exact figure, the app says “from” rather than asserting one.
Not yet launched. Routing, transit, TfL fares, coach fares and the London charges are live; drop-off charges and station parking are verified against operators’ own pages; airport parking rates remain calibrated against published aggregator prices and are marked as such. Parking inventory is the one remaining gap. We have an affiliate relationship in place and are in conversation about a product feed; until that is connected, no operator shown in the app holds a booking relationship with us.
Get in touch
For partnership and affiliate enquiries, or to see the app running against your inventory.
Want to see it first? app.underway.travel runs the real thing on live data.
Or ask to be told when it launches — send a blank email and we will add you to the list.