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Business
OneTravelSource.com is a website for travelers, offering discount airfare, hotel rates, car rentals, customized trips, and last minute getaways. The company's site offers a variety of web tools to help users around the world quickly access information most pertinent to their personal itineraries. Bookings have increased by 300% since 2003 with over 100,000 travelers annually now using the company's services to book reservations. A key to growth has been the expansion of information made available to customers. The company was founded in 2001 and is located in Florida.
Challenge
OneTravelSource.com had been using a company called I-Maps for their mapping services, but software developer Brent Scott says, "The biggest limitation was that the maps were not scrollable." Also, he had no control over the icons and searches were limited to North America, a real problem for a company offering international travel options.
Scott, along with company president, Patrick Noennig, also wanted to offer more accurate visuals of cities, including broader-radius attractions clearly marked on a map interface. Ideally, these attractions would be available on the same page, so that users did not have to click through multiple times to find multiple locations. A best case scenario would allow users to click and drag out to see a forty-mile area surrounding their hotel choice so they could discover interesting day trip attractions they might want to visit.
Transitioning from a "tell" model to a "show" model was another big consideration. "We wanted to be able to use the map function in such a way that we could show clients hotels on our maps, rather than just list them," says Scott.
Solution
When OneTravelSource.com decided to switch to a new mapping service, they looked at Google Maps as well as MapQuest and Microsoft products. Says Scott, "When it came down to it, when we saw what Google Maps for Enterprise could do, we decided to go with that option. When we first looked at it, it seemed very innovative compared to other choices. I think the main factor that cinched the thing was the fact that all of the maps, including international, came in the package. With MapQuest, Europe, Canada and other countries are all add-ons."
Saving money wasn't the only benefit of choosing a product with international maps built-in. Just branching out of North America was a boon. "We do business all over, we're international, so it's nice to have mapping there," says Noennig. The ability to flip a switch to the local language on a map adds still more functionality to the international map searches. In a click, customers can find what they need in their won language.
Both Scott and Noennig appreciate Google Maps scalability. "If there is no availability close to where users are searching, they can go out twenty or thirty miles and look at other available properties," says Scott. Users can opt to view a driving map, a satellite view, or a hybrid of the two. "It's totally point and click," says Scott. The ability to scroll out also allows viewers to see nearby attractions. "It's nice to let them know it's exactly where they want to be," says Noennig.
Benefits on the IT side were quickly apparent, too. "It was easy to integrate," Scott says. "I was impressed with that. It was really straightforward. Based on what we had going, Google Maps was, by far, easier to integrate than our other choices."
Noennig appreciates the non-commercial side of Google Maps for Enterprise. "When we saw where you were going to put ads on the public maps but not on the enterprise edition that got our attention." This absence of advertisement adds to the overall aesthetic value of OneTravelSource.com, which Scott thinks is great. "It's a good looking map," he says. "It blends more to our web site than the old mapping. I especially like that I'm able to control icons."
Switching to Google Maps has encouraged users to click through more often. "We've seen more users going to Google Maps," says Scott, which he attributes to the ability to put the company's hotel icons and additional information directly on a map, rather than the old way, which simply brought up an image map and also required more clicks. "This way is a lot easier for users, rather than having users go from page to page to gather information."
Results
The switch to Google Maps has helped OneTravelSource.com keep up with exponential site growth. With thousands of customers visiting the site daily, and with travel site competition being fierce, the company needed a way to keep customers at the site, and to have good reason to return. The move from static to scrollable maps, along with the ability to insert customized icons, pushed usability forward by leaps and bounds. For Noennig, customers' main satisfaction boils down to one thing, "It's just easier to have all the information on one page." That easiness was made much easier by Google Maps.
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