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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Transportation
Transportation ChatGPT Plugins were the subset of third party plugins published in the ChatGPT Plugins store between March 2023 and April 2024 that focused on moving people by train, bus, ferry, plane, peer to peer rental car, electric vehicle road trip, and urban metro. The category overlapped with travel chatgpt plugins and cars chatgpt plugins but had a distinct emphasis on schedule lookup, multimodal route comparison, and live transit data rather than on hotel booking or activity planning. The plugin program was operated by OpenAI, ran from March 23, 2023 until April 9, 2024, and was succeeded by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store. This article serves as a historical reference; the plugins listed here are no longer reachable through the original ChatGPT interface.[1][2]
The transportation grouping was never a formal category inside the plugin store. OpenAI sorted plugins by Popular, New, and All rather than by topic, so the same entry could surface under labels such as Travel, Transportation, or Lifestyle depending on third party catalogue conventions. For an overview, see chatgpt plugin categories.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023 with twelve launch partners plus first party plugins for web browsing and code execution.[1] Two launch partners, Expedia and KAYAK, were travel companies, but no pure transportation provider was included on day one. Plugin access was initially gated behind a waitlist for Plus subscribers and a subset of developers.[1] On May 12, 2023, OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and the plugin store opened broadly on May 19, 2023.[3]
Through the rest of May and the summer, transportation entries arrived in clusters. Turo announced a peer to peer car sharing plugin on May 19, 2023.[4] Ferryhopper launched as the first ferry plugin during the same window.[5] BART Real-Time, the Korea subway route plugin, JetBook.Click, the Etihad Airline plugin, the Tesla focused Supercharger plugin, and the C3 Glide aviation data plugin all joined the catalogue between mid-May and late June 2023.[6][7][8][9][10][11] Omio, billed as the first ground transportation provider with a multimodal plugin, announced on August 3, 2023.[12] Deprecation came in two steps. At OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023, the company introduced Custom GPTs and announced that plugins would be retired in favour of GPTs and a new tool calling layer called Actions.[2] On March 19, 2024 the plugin store closed to new installations and new conversations; on April 9, 2024 existing plugin conversations stopped working.[13]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plugins with twelve launch partners; no pure transportation provider is included.[1] |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces general availability of plugins for ChatGPT Plus subscribers.[3] |
| May 19, 2023 | Plugin store opens broadly; Turo announces its plugin the same day.[4] |
| June 20, 2023 | JetBook.Click and the Korea subway route plugin are first added to public catalogues.[8][9] |
| Mid-2023 | Ferryhopper, BART Real-Time, Etihad Airline, Supercharger, and C3 Glide become available.[5][6][7][10][11] |
| August 3, 2023 | Omio announces its multimodal plugin covering trains, buses, ferries, and flights.[12] |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces Custom GPTs, the successor framework.[2] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.[14] |
| March 19, 2024 | Plugin store closes to new installations and new conversations.[13] |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing plugin conversations stop working; the platform is fully shut down.[13] |
The underlying large language model behind the plugin platform in 2023, principally GPT-4, had two practical limitations for transportation queries. Its training data was fixed at September 2021, so it could not answer questions about today's schedules, ticket prices, or live service advisories, and it could not reach proprietary databases such as ticketing inventories or transit operator APIs. Transportation plugins addressed both problems by fetching live data at query time. Each plugin published a manifest file at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json and an OpenAPI specification describing its endpoints. ChatGPT consumed both at install time, then decided when to call the plugin during a conversation, formatting the JSON response in chat with deep links back to the developer's site.
A transportation query typically followed three patterns: schedule and route lookup; multimodal comparison, where one query produced options across several modes for the user to pick by price, duration, or carbon footprint; and real time status, returning live arrival times, service advisories, or weather observations. None of the launched transportation plugins completed a financial transaction inside ChatGPT. Bookings, payments, and ticket issuance happened on the developer's own site through the deep link. OpenAI's safety guidance during the beta discouraged plugins that triggered legal or financial commitments without a clear user confirmation step on the developer's surface. The conversational layer benefited from prompt engineering practices around translating subjective phrases such as the cheapest, the fastest, or the greenest into structured filter parameters.
The table below lists plugins confirmed by at least two credible sources during the live era. All ceased operating on April 9, 2024.
| Plugin | Developer | Mode | Coverage | Function |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Omio | Omio GmbH | Trains, buses, ferries, flights | 47 countries | Multimodal search across 1,000+ transport providers.[12] |
| Turo | Turo, Inc. | Peer to peer car rental | US, Canada, France, UK, Australia | 320,000+ vehicles across 1,400 makes and models.[4] |
| Ferryhopper | Ferryhopper | Ferries | Europe, Mediterranean | Ferry route, schedule, and price search.[5] |
| BART Real-Time | Independent | Urban rail | San Francisco Bay Area | Real time train arrivals by station and direction.[6] |
| Korea subway route | metrochat.xyz | Urban metro | South Korea | Subway route, distance, time, and transfer lookup.[9] |
| Etihad Airline | Etihad Airways and Astra Tech | Airline | Etihad network worldwide | Flight search on Etihad Airways.[10] |
| JetBook.Click | JetBook.Click | Airline metasearch | Multinational | Cross airline flight search with destination info.[8] |
| C3 Glide | BoldStratus | General aviation data | Worldwide | Live METARs, TAFs, and NOTAMs for pilots.[11] |
| Supercharger | Independent | EV road trip planning | Tesla supercharger network | Tesla routing with charging stops; owner's manual chat.[7] |
Omio, the Berlin based booking platform for ground transport, announced its plugin on August 3, 2023.[12] The company described it as the first by a ground transportation provider, letting users compare travel across trains, buses, flights, and ferries in a single conversation. Subscribers could ask which is the fastest way to travel from Paris to Amsterdam next Tuesday, and receive a list with departure times, durations, prices, and deep links back to Omio for booking. The plugin drew on Omio's inventory of more than 1,000 transport providers across 47 countries.[12] In contrast to the airline focused KAYAK and Expedia plugins on day one, Omio's value was its multimodal coverage, useful when the choice between a six hour train and a one hour flight depended on price, schedule, or carbon footprint.
Turo, the United States peer to peer car sharing marketplace, announced its plugin on May 19, 2023, becoming the first car sharing or car rental company in the catalogue.[4] Subscribers could describe a trip in everyday language, including desired vehicle type, location, dates, and price, and receive recommendations drawn from Turo's inventory of more than 320,000 active vehicles across 1,400 makes and models, with the top three to five options ranked by distance, price, and ratings.[4] Turo overlaps with cars chatgpt plugins but is included here because the in chat use case was almost always trip planning rather than vehicle research.
Ferryhopper, an Athens based ferry booking platform, launched the first ferry travel plugin for ChatGPT in 2023.[5] Users could ask how to get from Barcelona to Ibiza and then to Formentera next Tuesday, and receive an itinerary with sailing times, durations, and prices, plus deep links back to Ferryhopper for booking. The plugin's strength was complex island hopping itineraries with tight connections between multiple short hops, a use case that travel meta search engines covered poorly at the time.[5] The Ferryhopper database focused on European routes, especially the Mediterranean.
BART Real-Time wrapped the Bay Area Rapid Transit public real time arrivals feed. Users asked for the next trains departing from a specific station in a specific direction, for example heading south from Powell Street, and received live arrival times along with any active service advisories.[6] The Korea subway route plugin at metrochat.xyz returned routes between any two stations in Korean metro networks, including distance, estimated travel time, and transfer instructions, and was first added on June 20, 2023.[9] Neither plugin had a booking layer because both fare systems settle through stored value cards rather than online ticket sales. They stand out as rare examples of public transit data exposed through a conversational interface.
The Etihad Airline plugin was developed in cooperation with Astra Tech, the parent company of the Botim messaging app. Users searched Etihad Airways flights by entering departure and arrival airport, travel dates, booking class, and passenger count split between adults, children, and infants.[10] Astra Tech stated that the GPT integration would be among the first to operate in Arabic in addition to English.[10] The plugin was limited to Etihad's own network. JetBook.Click, an independent flight metasearch plugin first added on June 20, 2023, searched airlines and travel agencies for the cheapest fares and supplemented results with destination information in more than 70 locales.[8] Skift's August 2023 review reported that it handled one way fare search reasonably well but failed on round trips and often returned outdated prices.[15]
C3 Glide was an aviation data plugin from BoldStratus that gave general aviation pilots and dispatchers conversational access to METARs (surface weather observations), TAFs (terminal aerodrome forecasts covering a 24 to 30 hour window), and NOTAMs (notices to airmen describing temporary conditions).[11] The plugin accepted ICAO and IATA airport codes as well as latitude and longitude pairs. The Supercharger plugin was a Tesla focused trip planner that accepted an origin, a destination, optional waypoints, and a Tesla model, and returned a route with the supercharger stops needed to complete the journey.[7] Each result included a table with supercharger names, locations, and recommended stop durations, plus a static map image. A secondary mode let users ask natural language questions about a Tesla vehicle and receive answers extracted from the owner's manual.[7]
The transportation grouping was thinner than the broader travel chatgpt plugins category. Several adjacent functions were absent or only partly represented during the live era.
| Adjacent function | Status during the plugin era |
|---|---|
| On demand ride hail | Not represented; an Uber integration arrived later through the ChatGPT Apps surface in 2025.[16] |
| Public transit ticketing | Not represented; agency tickets were sold through their own apps and stored value cards. |
| Real time traffic and routing | Partially represented through Supercharger and Korea subway route. |
| Long distance bus deep links | Covered by Omio in aggregate but not by individual operator plugins. |
| Cruise ship booking | Not represented; covered partly by general travel plugins. |
| Bike sharing and scooters | Not represented. |
| Animal transportation | Catalogued as Hauling Buddies, filed under Miscellaneous.[17] |
The absences reflect both the early state of the platform and OpenAI's safety guidance, which favoured low risk informational endpoints during the beta. Operators with a well established mobile booking flow, particularly transit agencies and ride hail companies, had little incentive to expose ticketing through a third party chat surface in 2023.
Transportation plugins drew coverage from technology and travel trade publications throughout 2023. Skift's August 17, 2023 review of travel plugins on ChatGPT Plus reported a mixed picture in which the natural language interface was pleasant to use but the underlying inventory matching could be unreliable, with prices that shifted between the chat and the booking page.[15] Trade publications such as Auto Rental News and Travel and Tour World framed Turo and Ferryhopper as the first conversational entry points into their respective categories.[4][5] No public usage figures were released for any individual transportation plugin.
Usage of the broader plugin platform remained concentrated among power users. OpenAI cited this concentration as a reason for replacing plugins with Custom GPTs, arguing that the install flow was too involved for typical Plus subscribers.[2] On March 19, 2024 the plugin store closed to new installations and conversations, and on April 9, 2024 the runtime was turned off entirely.[13] Several airline and transit data providers later shifted to direct integrations through the OpenAI API. Omio relaunched in ChatGPT through the newer ChatGPT Apps SDK, covering more than 3,000 transport partners; this newer integration is out of scope for this article.[18]
The category demonstrated that transit operators, airlines, ferries, peer to peer rental marketplaces, and aviation data providers were willing to expose their schedules and live data through a third party chat surface. It also illustrated the limits of the early plugin model: an opaque install flow, a three plugin per chat ceiling that constrained cross modal workflows, and no usage analytics for developers. These limits motivated the move to GPTs in late 2023 and the later ChatGPT Apps SDK, both of which inherited the multimodal route comparison concept that transportation plugins had pioneered.