Industry: Tourism
Country: Czechia
Solution / Service: Google Maps Platform
Travel agency NaCesty.cz, a leading search engine for tours, accommodation and airline tickets, offers tours from German travel agencies to Czech customers. Google Maps have been used to improve the offered services since 2015 when the cooperation with Globema started.
Challenge
Planning a trip involves a multi-level organization. When choosing a destination, we take into account the date and place of departure. It often happens that planning the arrival to the departure point recedes into the background.
NaCesty’s focus has always been on offering better services than those of their competitors – so the company set itself the goal of solving the problem of difficult and time-consuming access to an airport handling flights in our chosen, often distant, destination. To achieve this, the company needed, among other things, a map platform with which to search for and show the best departure airports.
Solution
NaCesty has enhanced its site with the function allowing to search (based on address data) and visualize the nearest departure points, based on Google Maps.
The company decided to implement Google Maps because it is the most up-to-date and scalable map platform in the world. It offers global coverage, rich and real-time data, and a well-known map interface, which users love –plus the implementation of the web services is very easy.
Why Google Maps?
Google Maps is one of the easiest and most popular mapping tools. Google Maps APIs gave NaCesty full access to Google’s global database of over 100 million properties. The list of places has been filtered based on the needs of NaCesty users – to display airports. Thanks to the implementation of map services, the number of users and customers has increased and the cost of customer support has been reduced. Moreover, it enables:
- finding the nearest departure airports based on the user location and calculation of the travel distances through the Distance Matrix API service
- selecting the departure airports interactively from the map
- displaying all hotels in the selected destination on an interactive map
- filtering hotels displayed on the map according to different parameters, and
- it provides aerial imagery of the location of a particular hotel which allows exploring the surrounding area from the comfort of our home.
You can use postal codes to determine the distance and time needed to reach nearby airports. The company has prepared a database of flight duration divided into places offering direct and transfer connections. Thanks to this information, the website is able to propose airports located at a distance shorter than, for example, 2.5 hours by car from the traveler’s home or place of accommodation, and flights – not longer than 2.5 hours. This feature distinguishes NaCesty from other search engines.
Effects
Thanks to the implementation of Google Maps, the number of customers choosing the services offered by NaCesty has increased. Additionally, 25% of the website users started using the connections recommended by the website, which significantly reduced the working time of the company’s telephone consultants.
The implemented Google Maps service offers the most convenient solutions, facilitates travel organization, and thus increases the satisfaction of customers using the NaCesty website.
1000000
people visit the Nacesty.cz website annually
4000
clients book travel with NaCesty.cz every year
50000
hotels offer deals through the NaCesty.cz website