Maps are always essential when traveling, especially the adventurous kind. But despite having vast databases, search capabilities, and 3D bells and whistles, today’s travel mapping platforms still struggle to become the logical place for travelers to plan their trips.
Google Maps is the market leader in general mapping. The platform powers more than 5 million mobile apps and websites and has more than 1 billion monthly users, according to the company. In reality, it may be twice that number. Despite expanding into the world of hotel and flight search, Google appears to want to distance itself from fulfillment and hand over clicks to partners who pay for the service.
Mobility as a Service Provider Moovit claims to have 1.5 billion users, but this isn’t travel planning in the Google sense. Founded in 2012, the platform has built this great user base on travel plans within 3,500 cities around the world. But the company has broader ambitions, adding in 2024 the ability to plan trips between regions within the same country and time zone, which it says will be “particularly useful for holiday planning.”
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Meanwhile, Apple surprised many this year by rolling out a beta version of Apple Maps on the web, 12 years after its release on iOS. On the web, in addition to the usual mix of driving and walking directions, photos, ratings and reviews, we also offer curated guides to finding places to eat, shop and explore in cities around the world. The company hopes to grow its user base of 500 million monthly users through expanded web search.
Piggybacking on Google
Travel technology startups remain interested in mapping, but many are choosing to piggyback on Google Maps rather than reinventing the wheel. Wanderlog’s drag-and-drop travel planner and budget planner makes it easy to create vacation itineraries and custom Google Maps from a list of recommended attractions and lodging content from Google and Airbnb.
BluePlanit’s Travel Mapper, on the other hand, allows you to create itineraries in Google Sheets and generate itineraries in Google Maps. London-based Citymapper has captured a significant share of travel mapping and mobility-as-a-service, with more than 50 million users. Thanks to our radical focus on user experience, we were able to build an audience and acquire apps without spending huge amounts of money on marketing. This is the fifth consecutive year. Like Moovit, Citymapper focuses on intra-city travel planning rather than inter-city travel planning.
Germany’s Textomap allows users such as travel influencers and hotel accommodations to generate savable maps automatically from blocks of input text or directly from ChatGPT prompts (for example, “Family in Paris”). “Creating the perfect trip to”). The generated map can be embedded on your website or exported to Google Maps.
Joshua Kaufman is the co-founder of user-generated social mapping platform Atly, which raised $18 million in funding in 2023. He said: “I feel like mapping is one of the only technologies that seems to be getting better, but it’s not really getting better. Please give me 20 minutes and go get your Ph.D.”
The problem, Kaufman believes, is that many mapping platforms are built on outdated concepts such as star ratings, which condense valuable information into a single score, which is of limited value. I am.
Natural language search and maps
“It was incredibly insightful to get a rating of 1 on a 1 to 5 from someone in the absence of any information,” Kaufman said.
“Now we’re in a world where the average place in New York has at least 500-1000 reviews. Additional reviews are literally meaningless. The future of mapping is that instead of searching for a location, you just type What I want is a coffee shop where you can take your dog, and a park where a lot of single people go.”
The future of mapping will be that instead of searching for a location, you’ll just type in what you want, like a coffee shop where you can take your dog or a park that many single people go to.
Joshua Kaufman – Atlee
Atly built an algorithm called Placerank to solve this problem and put the technology to the test by building what Kaufman calls “the most robust gluten-free map in the entire world.” He said Atly’s maps feature more locations and are already more accurate than the previous market leader, which took 13 years and 1.5 million people to compile.
Aaron Gowell, CEO of SaaS provider SilverRail Technologies, agreed: “Maps can be much more powerful than they actually are.” SilverRail recently signed an agreement with Google to provide rail search and booking capabilities on Google Maps.
Gowell said Google has an advantage because of its standardized interface that people are familiar with, but there is room for improvement. He believes the problem lies in the disconnect between search and booking.
“My personal view is that the killer app is basically Citymapper and the platform underneath, where you can trade all the pieces and put them in your wallet,” he said.
“With transactions and augmented reality, it becomes like a tool to move around with, and this could be truly transformative.”
SilverRail is working on its own app called Vivi with similar goals, but is quick to point out that this is not a B2C effort.
Gowell said adding AI could make maps apps smarter, such as predicting when to use them for work or leisure, or letting them know when to walk the last mile of a trip on a sunny day. He said he could make suggestions.
“Overall, I think generative AI is a natural step in the evolution of how users interact with commuting and mapping platforms. Generative AI can provide personalized results, so you can improve your travel plans and interests. ” said Ziv Kabaretti. , Vice President of Products at Moovit.
“Having said that, we believe we still have a ways to go before we can fully rely on AI to provide the most accurate and customized results. “Do you have any questions?” can be entered by voice, allowing users to instantly receive results tailored to their needs. Additionally, uttering questions or commands quickly is an optimal experience for users who find it more difficult and time-consuming to tap multiple buttons or interact with more specialized features of an app. Possibly. ”
3D at play
Major mapping platforms are betting on 3D. In May, Google announced that developers could now use Google’s unique, fast rendering of photorealistic 3D maps, and in September it added fly-to and fly-around capabilities to 3D maps, making tourism more accessible. Spots, destinations, and hotels can now easily add guided tours. Website.
Meanwhile, Niantic Labs in San Francisco has launched a 3D rendering technique called Gaussian splats. This allows the creation of “fully immersive 3D models that are more accurate, more vivid, and render faster than previous technologies.” In recent years, Niantic has quietly encouraged users of its hugely popular Pokémon GO app to scan real-world locations as part of gameplay. These scans now form the basis of a mapping platform that goes beyond gaming.
Atly’s Kaufman believes the plunge into 3D is a dead end. “Walkthroughs of locations with 3D renderings are pretty cool, but I’ve never used them.”
Augmented reality could be the tipping point. Google introduced Google Glass too early, but Meta’s collaboration with sunglasses maker Ray-Ban and advances in AI, 3D and mapping could be transformative. There’s a good chance the map will turn out to be a killer app, but it’s unlike any map you’ve ever seen.
