Is your business listed in car navigation?

A few weeks ago we advised that you can have a free map of your business location on your website, complete with driving directions from anywhere in New Zealand. A lot of companies have taken us up on our offer and we would love more people to take advantage of it.

Another feature of the AA Maps Bizlocator is that your company location information will also be provided to the major car navigation brands in New Zealand. Even if you don’t have a website, or don’t want a map of your business location on your site, you can still register your business location on the form, which you can find by clicking on the button that says ‘Add Your Business For Free’ on the AA Maps web page.

By completing your information and after validation, your companies details will be included in the Points of Interest data we supply to all the major car navigation brads including Navman, TomTom, Nav N Go, Horizon, BMW, Siemens VDO and more. This means that if people are in their car looking for your type of business, they will be able to find it and be conveniently guided to your door.

It doesn’t matter what your business is, it could be a cafe, a stationery shop, a dentist or pretty much anything. Car navigation systems allow people to search for businesses by category, close to where the car is at the time or close to the destination the driver is going to.

For example, let’s say someone is going to Rotorua for a sporting event and they need to buy some new runners or a spare bike tyre, they can then find your business without any local knowledge or needing the Internet or a phone book.

The service to you is totally free, the only catch is that you have to log on to your free account at AA Maps at least once a year to confirm that your information is still current.

Free map and directions on your New Zealand website

If you have a business, shop, club, church, school, sport venue or any other venue with a web site, we are delighted to offer you a free map to go on your web site. We have created a tool called the AA Maps BizLocator which you can use for free to put a map on yor website.

We launched this over the last few months at the Small Business Expo and the most common question was, “What’s the catch?” So here it is: At least once a year, you need to confirm that your information is up to date because as well as giving you a map on your website, we share your business information with other services:

• Car Navigation. We supply maps and Points of Interest to 93% (and growing) of the New Zealand car navigation market. By using our service, yor company or location details will be supplied to car navigation product including Navman, TomTom, Siemens VDO, BMW, Ford, Honda, NavNGo, Horizon and many other brands, to help people look for your business by brand, type, name or keyword.
• Web sites such as AA Maps, Bayleys and Professionals Real Estate and many more that use Points of Interest to add value to their sites.

Ok, so it’s free, but will we charge later? No, the AA Maps BizLocator is a free service and will remain free. The only cost to you may be a very small charge by yor web developer to place the map on your web site.

We have the only full turn restriction web site for New Zealand because we have driven the whole country and can therefore ensure that people can use our driving directions to get from anywhere in New Zealand to your business, by the fastest route and even print the directions on an A4 sheet via the AA Maps web page, so that your customers or associates can take the directions with them in the car.

By providing people with directions to your location for free, you are also playing your part in reducing the carbon footprint by giving them accurate directions and making sure they don’t get lost. It’s amazing how many people you see driving round with a dazed look on their faces and a map ion their hands. Make your business easy to work with and put yourselves on the map with us for free.

Even if you don’t have a website, but have a destination, go to the AA Maps website and LIST FOR FREE because your information will still go into the car navigation and web maps to help people find you.

The Travelling Salesman Problem

GeoSmart now has a solution available for people wanting to know which order to visit their clients in, so that they can keep time and travel costs to a minimum. This is a form of Route Optimisation known as the Travelling Salesman Problem. GeoSmart also offers complex Route Optimisation under the banner of Route2GO, but that is another story.

With the price of petrol now permanently above NZ$2 a litre and time at a premium, this tool can easily assist people in making the most of their travel.  It could be a delivery truck working out the order of their deliveries and in reverse order how to load the truck. It could be a sales person working out the best way to make their sales calls.

In the illustration you can see that we set the first and last addresses as fixed. In other words we are defining where we start and finish for the day, they don’t have to be the same, the last one could be a motel yo are staying at for the night and the first one might be your home or office. You could just fix the start point and be flexible on the end point and then go to the AA Maps website to decide where to stay for the night and even make the booking before you leave.

In the illustration, the sales person guessed an order in which to do the calls, but the optimised route cut 34km from the route and at the (adjustable) per km rate resulted in savings of $10 on the trip.

This tool doesn’t just have to be used for a set of destinations. It could also be used as a trip/price calculator. For example one of our new clients is putting this tool (slightly modified so that you can’t edit the price per km which only he can do on his site) so that people can get their own quote on a delivery job without having to ring the company.

Many companies pay staff or contractors on the basis of an agreed distance, it could be for commuting, or for visiting clients, patients etc. This tool can calculate the ‘fastest’ route between clients and will deliver a consistent result that can reduce arguments and deliver an equitable result.

There are other standard features to this tool, for example click on any of the letters denoting locations and the map will instantly zoom to that location so you can see it better. The maps are dynamic and do of course have full pan and zoom functionality.

This optimisation is possible because GeoSmart has a full turn restriction database for New Zealand so when it calculates these directions it knows all about one-way streets, dual carriageways, no right turn, no left turn etc. This is in fact the same database used by te leading car navigation brands including TomTom, Navman, Siemens VDO, BMW, Ford, Honda,Horizon and Nav N Go.

If you have a route optimisation problem, please send us an email to info@geosmart .co.nz or follow the directions on our Contact Page.