By: Becky Harris
Maps are essential to the Cool Cousin experience. We want travelers to get the most out of a city by visiting the places they like… and that all starts with knowing where you want to go and how to get there.
— Gil Azrielant, Cofounder and CTO at Cool Cousin
The same recommendation for everyone doesn’t make sense. That’s the thesis of Cool Cousin: the app that offers up customized recommendations to travelers from like-minded locals. When you’re planning an upcoming trip, open up the app to meet a local “cousin”, browse their curated maps, and discover the restaurants and activities that fit your taste. Travelers can browse city guides and direct message “cousins” for specific recommendations and guidance.
I recently traveled to Amsterdam for work and downloaded Cool Cousin to help me plan my trip. Knowing I’d have limited international mobile service, I downloaded a few offline city guides to help me get around. I found a delightful restaurant called Festina Lente in the Jordaan area (recommended by Burney) and grabbed a coffee at a cafe recommended to me by another local, Michal.
After my trip, I connected with Cool Cousin Co-founder and CTO, Gil Azrielant, to chat about the technology powering the app.
Getting There
Our Geocoding API and Matrix API power the app’s “Around Me” feature, which calculates distance and travel times to recommended points of interest in your immediate area
Once you choose your destination, our Directions API gives walking directions to get you where you need to go. You can even fire up turn-by-turn navigation right inside the Cool Cousin app as you walk — no need to close it out and open up a different directions app.
Design
When building out their city guides feature, Cool Cousin was laser-focused on giving users a seamless discovery experience. The team started with Studio and our Maps SDKs for iOS to create a muted basemap showcasing customized points of interest markers. The team was selective about map labeling; as you zoom and pan around, just enough neighborhood and street labels emerge to orient you — not enough to crowd out the “cousin’s” location markers. Runtime styling allows the map labels to change in real-time based on your location and preferred languages.
Our offline maps make Cool Cousin a practical app for on-the-go travelers:
Other providers have well documented APIs, but when it came to design flexibility and support for offline usage, Mapbox had the edge. We don’t want the app to be too heavy on a user’s device — especially because travelers won’t always be in a good service area or near wifi — so we use Mapbox’s offline maps to generate a map preview for each city, and load static images for travelers in spotty service areas.
Up next: living maps
Down the line, the Cool Cousin team wants to include data visualizations to help users know what’s going on around them in real-time.
We want to show users the living pulse of a city. We’re looking into visualizing social check-ins at festivals, parades, and concerts — adding a heatmap layer is a really good way for us to show live anonymized data.
If you’re planning a trip (or even just looking for hidden gems in your own city) download Cool Cousin for iOS and keep an eye out for their upcoming Android release. If you’re looking to build location-based discovery into your app with our APIs and SDKs, drop us a note.
Traveling like a local: How Cool Cousin uses maps to personalize travel was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.