The MapQuest Platform: Guiding Travelers to Your Locations with Advanced Mapping Solutions

For today’s web-savvy travelers, online exploration and research usually precedes real-world journeys. Whether you cater to business or leisure travelers, casual diners or avid foodies, your online presence has to be as distinctive and welcoming as your real-world locations.

With the MapQuest® Platform, you can build the custom mapping solutions and travel, car rental, restaurant, and hotel locators that make your website an attractive destination in its own right. You can add highly dynamic, interactive features that engage your online visitors and encourages a return visit – increasing the likelihood that they’ll book a reservation through your website.

The business or hotel locator you create with the MapQuest Platform can do more than tell website visitors where to find your locations and services. Your custom mapping solution can also showcase the unique amenities and services available at each hotel property. It can highlight the nearby restaurants, entertainment, and attractions that make your hotel locations appealing destinations.

In addition to helping customers find you, the mapping solutions you build with the MapQuest Platform can help support call center reservations and visualize your competition and coverage within markets to support strategic decisions such as expansion plans.

Hotel Search Results - La Quinta® Inns & Suites

The MapQuest Platform: Simplifying Inquiries into the Optimum Route to the Best Locations

It’s a simple equation: the easier you make it for clients to find your locations online, the more likely they are to book with you. With the MapQuest® Platform, you can make your business or hotel locator a reliable and easy-to-use resource for clients to find the right location with the right amenities and services. Some of the features you can add to your mapping solution include:

• Advanced Routing and Searching – You can use the MapQuest Platform to create a business or hotel locator that helps your guests locate your property and navigate the surrounding area more easily. You can offer trip planning tools that provide driving directions based on shortest trip time, shortest distance, avoiding highways or toll roads, as well as the most efficient route encompassing multiple destinations. Travelers can use these tools to plan driving itineraries that include stops at your hotel locations. Your website visitors can search for locations using drive time or distance, city, zip codes, or other geographic criteria. Customers could also focus their searches based on the custom data you provide on specific hotel amenities and hospitality services at each property, including availability, price, rating, room size, and menus. In essence, your mapping solution can function as the interface for a wide range of information and capabilities, including videos and virtual tours.
• Interactive Maps – You can help your website visitors visualize a hotel location and its neighborhood through aerial or satellite imagery, hybrid views, and drag and pan capabilities that encourage guests to explore a property’s surrounding area in detail.
• Send to Cell – You can offer your customers the ability to send maps and driving directions directly to their web-enabled wireless phones and devices to have with them on the go.
• Multi-Language Support – With the MapQuest Platform, your website can offer your hotel guests driving directions in multiple languages.

Showcasing Amenities and Services

The amenities available at your properties can be as important to potential hotel guests as your locations. The MapQuest Platform gives you the tools to build mapping capabilities that can focus a guest’s search on specific offerings such as restaurants and lounges, fitness centers, pools, meeting facilities, shopping, concierge services, and hi-speed Internet access.

You can customize your mapping solution interface and allow your website visitors to click on a specific property opening a pop-up window with information including the available hotel facilities, features and photos. Website visitors could then click through for more detailed information and virtual tours to encourage them to book a reservation.

Highlighting Nearby Points of Interest

Your property is the starting point for a visit that often encompasses shopping centers, theaters, museums, convention centers, airports, restaurants, and other attractions. With MapQuest Platform Service’s extensive Points of Interest database, you can use your business or hotel locator to highlight the proximity of your properties to nearby attractions, helping promote the desirability of your locations.

Helping Clients Explore Your Area with Detailed Walking Directions

For guests who want to explore the neighborhood surrounding hotels or resorts, walking is often the transportation mode of choice. Using the MapQuest Platform, you can equip your hotel locator with the capability to generate walking directions to nearby restaurants, entertainment, and other businesses. Guests can easily determine the optimum route to their destinations and plan an itinerary that makes the most of their time.

Promoting Your International Hotel Locations

The MapQuest Platform gives you the flexibility to include many of your international locations as part of your business or hotel locator solution. You can build awareness of your locations and improve the likelihood that guests at your domestic properties will remember your brand when booking overseas travel.

Supporting Strategic Analysis and Marketing to Corporate Clients

The travel and hospitality mapping solutions you build with the MapQuest Platform can give you critical location information that can support your strategic decision making. By integrating your custom data, you can demonstrate your coverage within specific cities and areas to companies negotiating preferred status.

When evaluating potential new locations, you can use your custom mapping solution to visualize the location’s proximity to competitors, airports, major business centers, and high-traffic areas. Your business or hotel locator can also highlight soon-to-open and recently opened locations to build awareness of new properties.

Giving Clients On-the-Go Access through Their Mobile Devices

With the MapQuest Platform, you can create custom travel or hotel wireless mapping solutions tailored to mobile devices, so customers can find your properties and locations anytime, anywhere.

Building Your Brand with a Reliable Partner

With the MapQuest Platform, you can add dynamic mapping capabilities to your website that will help make your business or hotel locator an engaging, comprehensive travel resource. And MapQuest’s reputation as an industry leader can strengthen your own brand. Independent studies have shown that the MapQuest brand stands out as the most visited, most reliable, most trusted, and easiest to use online mapping service.* The MapQuest Platform allows you to incorporate the MapQuest® brand into your travel or hospitality website so you can benefit from this association.

Streamlined Data Management

MapQuest provides simple tools to upload and manage information on your properties and locations to help keep your hotel finder or business locator accurate and relevant. You can also manage your MapQuest account usage online and sort your view of data to meet your specific needs.

Want to Make Your Locations Must-See Destinations?

Contact MapQuest Platform Services today for more on how you can use the MapQuest Platform to build a dynamic mapping solution that puts your properties on travelers’ and corporate clients’ short lists, while improving your strategic insight.

* Keynote Systems Survey, September 2006; Landor & Associates, Brand Asset Valuator Study, June 2007 and comScore media metrics, US Mapping, 2004-2007 rates MapQuest as having the most Unique Visitors.