(PSFK) — For those who love to visually show their world through their travel experiences, mobile apps such as Instagram, VSCO, Yelp, Airbnb and City Notes are must-have, must-use. But over the past few years, Citymaps has made it onto that list.
Citymaps allows users to create personalized maps attached to rich visuals, aggregating all of your favorite places in any city into a mobile visual grid. But because of the limitations in other apps, users are creating alternative ways to experience places that they visit. Are you gluten-free and want to keep a record of gluten-free places to eat at? Are you an avid traveler that wants to discover all the hidden places within the cities you visit devoid of traditional tourists? Do want to drink yourself across the country, have sex in strange bathrooms and explore hip hop landmarks? Well you can that with Citymaps community of users in visually appealing ways.
And if you want to take these guides analog, you can share your favorites by printing or sending your collections through PDFs.
In order to better understand how this mobile app has developed such a unique and loyal users base, I spoke with Elliot Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Citymaps.
How has Citymaps developed such a unique user base?
Citymaps is where world-curious travelers indulge their passion for exploration—whether they’re getting on a plane tomorrow or staying in their local neighborhood. Citymaps users are passionate about travel, and they seek to collect and share the best local information about every place around the world through detailed, curated map guides. Citymaps users know they can depend on the power of our community to provide the best and most reliable local knowledge for every interest, and every place in the world.
Citymaps is the world’s largest library of curated map collections. With hundreds of thousands of map collections already created in the library, Citymaps offers a one-stop shop of maps and guides, curated by local experts and well-known publishers including Travel & Leisure Magazine and The New York Times.
Citymaps’ map publishing platform gives users and publishers the tools to share their experiences in the form of beautiful, digital map collections. Since the analogue paper experience of making maps and guides has not translated well to the online ecosystem, Citymaps provides people and publishers with the tools they need to tell their stories with beautiful, digital map collections. Citymaps offers a range of map “templates” to help different users tell different types of stories. Map templates include: Maps with friends, Community Maps (wiki-style maps to crowdsource the world’s best local knowledge), Road Trip maps, Hotel Concierge maps, Travel Itinerary guides, Airbnb Host maps, and several more.
What problems does Citymaps hope to solve with its development? What problems does it continually solve to keep the user base so active?
Citymaps is the travel guidebook reinvented. Through our map collections, inspiring stories, practical, honest advice, and useful tools, what once required hours of rifling through guidebooks, or Googling into the provincial nooks of the Internet, is now attainable in an instant. Twitter tips, Instagram pics, Snapchat stories, up-to-the minute blogs and customized apps bursting with locals’ advice are all changing the way we travel. And increasingly we don’t need to find the information. It can find us.
Traditional guidebooks, it seems, are an endangered species.
Citymaps provides the kind of local wisdom and insider knowledge once only found in detailed guidebooks, where smart travelers go to suss out hotels, browse museum recommendations, and read reviews from travelers to see what others enjoyed—and did not enjoy—about a place.
What are some of the coolest experience users have created on the platforms?
Travel + Leisure:
- Our Favorite Local Bakeries
- World’s Best Nightlife Hotels
- Ultra-Cool, Ultra-Cheap Stays That Will Change Your Mind About Hostels
- 15 of New York’s Best Old School Restaurants and Bars
Gothamist:
- Where To Get The Best Lunch In Midtown East
- Where To Get The Best Lunch In The Financial District
- A Guide To NYC’s Many Delicious Food Halls
- 14 Places To See Before They Disappear
- 15 Abandoned Places That Look Hauntingly Beautiful
- Best Places To Eat Like A Local
- Epic Roads To Drive Before You Die
- I’d Tap That
What opportunities do businesses or places featured have at marketing to those interested in them via Citymaps?
Featured business on Citymaps can offer exclusive deals and offers to the Citymaps community. When a user adds a business to their list of favorites, they receive special deals through email alerts and push notifications. In addition, business owners can provide incremental value to their community by curating map guides for places near their business. For example, a yoga studio can curate a map of the best juice bars and healthy restaurants near their studio, fostering a deeper connection with their community by providing valuable, relevant guides for their local neighborhood.
In what ways can other companies leverage your API to build features into their own apps?
CItymaps provides individuals as well as large publishers a broad set of map-based publishing tools to quickly create interactive maps to help tell their stories. With Citymaps, you can manually add an unlimited number of pins to the maps you create, and you can customize the information on the map to include links, tips, reviews, photos, and descriptions. With one click, you can embed the map on your website, or alongside a blog post or editorial feature, making Citymaps a simple, time-saving solution to make and share beautiful, digital map guides.
Citymaps is the world’s leading set of map embeds that bring location-oriented content to life, giving it geographically-contextual awareness. For our publishing partners such as Travel + Leisure and Gothamist, embedding an interactive map alongside an editorial feature is an excellent way for online journalists to enhance context, relevance, and reader engagement.
In addition, Citymaps’ website and map embeds are fully optimized for mobile, providing visitors with an appropriate and intuitive user experience, allowing them to access information rapidly to make decisions on the fly. People like your brand more when you offer a satisfying mobile experience and they’re more likely to return to your website later on a desktop. 90 percent of people report moving between devices, or “multi-screening,” to accomplish a task. When your mobile experience is optimized for functionality and consistency it fosters trust and affinity with users. Further, Citymaps also offers a robust set of APIs and SDKs that allow third party developers to integrate our travel map.
Lead Image: d26b73 | CC | No changes made
This article was written by Macala Wright from PSFK and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
