By: Becky Harris
RoadGoat is helping travelers automatically track their travels and plan their next dream vacation.
The app houses a rich database of over 4.3 million cities and towns, all built on Mapbox maps. Travelers can connect their social media accounts, wearable devices, and email to visualize their travel history and share it with friends. With an understanding of past travel history, RoadGoat then provides personalized suggestions for the best destinations to check out next.
With an experience centered around a map, performance is critical. The RoadGoat team used Mapbox GL JS to create a fast-rendering, interactive map for their users. They then uploaded tilesets for country and US state borders and their own custom markers for cities. To make it intuitive and interactive, they then added some smart animations that appear as the user explores the map.
For example, when a user is looking for a specific place, flyto moves the map around quickly to reach the desired spot. Pop-ups on hover let users know what country/state/city is under the mouse. Upon click, the pop-up ‘freezes’ and allows the user to mark Been There or Want to Go. A user can seamlessly switch between the country, state, and city views of their maps as the layers change dynamically upon request. With responsive maps, users are also able to track their travels on both desktop and mobile.
The RoadGoat team initially began development with a different mapping provider, but in the middle of the process, the slow map load-time and lack of customizability frustrated the team.
“The map is the center of our app, so it has to be distinct, fast, and fun,” says Kurosh Hashemi, CEO, RoadGoat.
“I started looking at other companies that had great map integrations and realized that all the maps I liked were using Mapbox. So I decided to switch map providers and redo the product in the middle of the launch! Luckily, it was a smooth transition. Mapbox’s documentation was easy to understand, the product was much better, and our developers quickly figured out what they needed to build.”
Perhaps the coolest part is what the company wants to do longer term — Hashemi wants to build algorithms that can predict new destinations a traveler is likely to enjoy based on where they have already traveled. Identifying patterns and analyzing insights from past travels and reviews, RoadGoat aims to provide a “pandora station” for future travel adventures, that users will eventually be able to book directly in the app.
You can sign-up for a RoadGoat account for free today to start tracking your travels and exploring new destinations. And make sure to check out all of our awesome capabilities for travel companies.
Travel the world with RoadGoat was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.