Building Europe’s Best Outdoor Activities Map : New UK Map Released
Outdooractive Works with Suffolk County Council to pilot Definitive Map Data
Outdooractive, Europe’s largest outdoor tourism digital platform, has announced the release of its new UK map. Outdooractive’s new UK map is set to revolutionise the outdoor tourism experience, providing a comprehensive and detailed resource for outdoor enthusiasts and tourists alike. With its extensive data integration and intelligent routing capabilities, the map offers unparalleled opportunities for adventure and exploration.
Created by its in-house team of cartographers, the unique Outdooractive map brings together authoritative datasets from multiple data sources and suppliers. The scalable, vector map also includes a fully routable path network and specialised activity networks for hiking, cycling, mountain biking, and winter sports.
The Outdooractive map is available in the popular Outdooractive app, where consumers also have access to OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey maps, used to find adventure inspiration and for planning and navigating those outdoor activities.
It can also be used by tourism destinations and other business partners to embed maps, routes and attractions in their websites, or in their own-branded tourism app.
Whilst creating this first release of its new UK map, Outdooractive cartographers worked with Suffolk County Council to include data from the Suffolk Definitive Map. This pilot project has created a streamlined process that can now repeatedly be used to greatly improve the map experience rapidly across the country. Outdooractive is now inviting other definitive map data holders to work with its team.
Compared to OpenStreetMap, which is often used as the vector data source for outdoor apps, working with Suffolk County Council’s data means the new Outdooractive map has doubled the illustrated length of detailed rights of way paths, including footpaths, bridleways, restricted byways and byways open to all traffic (BOATs). As well as appearing on the map, this path network is fully routable using Outdooractive’s intelligent routing engine. More than double the number of protected areas (nature reserves, SSSIs, etc) are now marked in Suffolk on the map, whilst the number of waterways marked has also increased substantially.
All of which contributes to a better picture of the landscape for outdoor enthusiasts and tourists, and more opportunity to discover the perfect outdoor adventure.
Suffolk County Council already use Outdooractive’s Destination Pro platform to help them manage and promote outdoor tourism in their region through their Discover Suffolk campaign. This includes having their own Discover Suffolk app, built using Outdooractive’s white-label app platform, which features the new, more detailed, Outdooractive vector map, hundreds of route guides and places of interest, and is free to download from appstores.
“It is a massive investment to create our own map from thousands of data providers across Europe. We have a team of highly experienced cartographers and an engineering team focused on creating the best outdoor activity routing engine. We work closely with our destination and data partners, and it has been great to work with a forward-looking organisation such as Suffolk County Council to pilot this for our UK map.” said Hartmut Wimmer, Outdooractive Founder and CEO.
“This commitment is the only way to deliver the ultimate map for outdoor activities.” said Craig Wareham, Director Global B2C and UK CEO. “It means we can deliver – at scale across Europe – information on protected areas and rights of way that are not available elsewhere. It means we can use ferries data in our routing engine when planning coastal cycle rides and intelligently route using ski lift networks in the Alps for summer hiking or winter sports. Our platform also includes dynamic data on path closures and information on restricted areas (e.g. due to seasonal nesting birds), so we can automatically route around or avoid these.”
“We have been delighted to work with the Outdooractive team to improve the representation of the public rights of way network in Suffolk on both our own Discover Suffolk white-label app and Outdooractive’s parent platforms. Improving public access to accurately depict rights of way is one of the ways that we are attempting to reduce barriers to countryside access in Suffolk further”, added Ben Heather, Green Access Officer Public Rights of Way Team at Suffolk County Council.
Links to the apps:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/outdooractive-hiking-biking/id1364846172
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.outdooractive.Outdooractive
Contact for Outdooractive:
Germany, Austria, Switzerland: Isabelle Ernst (isabelle.ernst@outdooractive.com)
Global and UK: Craig Wareham (craig.wareham@outdooractive.com)