By: Noemi Walzebuck
With more travelers booking on-the-go in far-reaching places, our tools are powering more and more travel apps focused on slick UX and key features like offline support. Customers like Lonely Planet, National Geographic, Agoda, The Weather Channel, and Snapchat use our building blocks to add fast, reliable maps, search, and navigation into their apps.
We’re heading to several travel industry events this fall, and we’d love to talk, whether it’s about supporting your international expansion or incorporating augmented reality into your product. Email me to schedule a meeting at Skift Forum Sept 25–26 or Phocuswright Nov 7–9.
Add faster maps for faster conversions
Our platform ensures your users never see a lag, whether they are rendering, zooming, or panning to find what they need and book quickly. Mapbox is built on vector maps rendered using WebGL, an advanced approach to mapping where data is delivered to the device and rendered on the front end.
Panning our maps transfers 80% less data and is 3 seconds faster when loading hotel listings than direct competitors. The vector tiles above are loading at 60 frames per second, the speed of a video game. Our mobile SDKs for iOS and Android ship with the exact same vector maps, so booking travel is just as fast on mobile devices.
Be accessible and reliable anywhere in the world
Our global platform supports your users everywhere in the world, online or offline. With travel to China on the rise, we built Mapbox.cn to address the typical lagtime experienced across the Great Firewall.
Our infrastructure in China supports both international travelers in China and Chinese travelers abroad by handling their network requests at local data centers, avoiding downtime from the firewall. The result is maps that are 10 times faster than other providers.
For countries where smaller smartphone sizes and storage dominate the mobile market, our SDKs let you strip out any unneeded features so you can build for multiple international markets with a single solution. You can also maintain your app’s performance in areas with poor connectivity or no network connection at all with offline maps. Customers like GoTenna and CityMaps2Go leverage our pre-cached maps, styles, and data, so their users can download a region of the map roughly the size of Greater London without worrying about spotty coverage or roaming charges.
Build a custom UX that your users will 😍
Our robust suite of map design tools lets you customize every aspect of the UX down to the size of place names and road labels and how each detail displays at different zoom levels. Below are some key tools that will help you build a unique, differentiated experience for your users.
Mapbox Studio and our interactive web library GL JS provide full customizability, so you can add features like animated popups, custom markers, and 3D buildings. We love how Lonely Planet and National Geographic use our tools to build their personality into their maps.
Runtime styling allows you to dynamically change the look and feel of thousands of features on your map in real-time as travelers move about their day. For example, the map on the left (below) recommends points of interest by time of day, like coffee shops in the early morning and bars later in the evening. Runtime styling lets you filter and style large datasets — the map on the right shows a person new to a city what areas have the most places to shop or grab lunch. Users can quickly toggle between the different options, too.
With our heatmaps layer, you can show real-time trends like a social map of which areas of the city people are exploring right this minute or where to find the most highly rated bars or restaurants. You can also customize every layer so that, for example, labels display on top of your data.
In-app turn-by turn navigation provides directions and navigation instructions without kicking your users out to other apps. You control the entire experience, which means longer in-app sessions and more value for your users as they walk through an unfamiliar travel destination. Real-time traffic, up-to-the-minute ETAs, and automatic rerouting are just a few of the features included in our Navigation SDK for both iOS and Android.
Our plugins cut down on mobile development time by reducing lines of code needed from 200 to just two. Our plugin for voice-enabled functions allows your users to ask about the history of a nearby point of interest or just ask for directions while roaming a city. Our isochrones plugin visualizes where you can travel within a given time and mode of transportation. So its easy to show the best restaurants within a five minute drive of a given hotel, or to highlight landmarks within a twenty minute walk of your current location. This interactive demo uses the isochrones plugin to show what areas of London are accessible based on any given driving time.
Put Augmented Reality on your roadmap
What if you could plan a vacation over dinner with downtown Paris hovering in front of you, or explore camp sites at a coffee shop with friends as you pan through a 3D model of Yosemite? With Apple’s ARKit included in iOS 11, every iPhone has been turned into an AR-enabled device, with expected growth to 200 million devices by the end of 2017.
It is now much easier to display your app’s content in the context of the real world — a city guide app can display recommendations on where to eat and what to do as you pan the camera along a street. Our demo below gives turn-by-turn navigation in AR; no more walking in circles trying to orient the compass on a 2D map.
You can also use AR to share travel experiences in a new way. Adam Debreczeni built this AR visualization of his bike route draped over real-world 3D terrain. Explore popular routes yourself by downloading the app he built with Eric Florenzano, Fitness AR. Relive your bike rides in your living room or use the app to show off all of that elevation you climbed.
My bike ride in AR. (Unity + ARKit + Mapbox + Strava) https://t.co/g2uVwVlM3h
— @heyadam
If you’re interested in creating entirely new travel experiences with us, email me to set up a time at Skift Forum or Phocuswright, or contact sales to learn more.
Travel is all about location was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.