State agency CzechTourism operates popular travel portal KudyZnudy.cz, which offers thousands of points of interest. Find out how we managed to bring a large and daily updated travel tips database to a mobile app, without having to open a web portal.
CzechTourism approached us with the need for a solution that could easily and quickly provide users with interesting places, tips and events at their current location.
CzechTourism is an official national agency that supports tourism and promotes the Czech Republic as a tourist destination at home and abroad. It organizes domestic and foreign conferences, supports the development of regional tourism and it helps local tourism organizations.
One of the agency’s long-term successful projects is the popular web portal KudyZnudy.cz. Clear evidence shows that the number of visitors has risen to 20 million per year.
KudyZnudy.cz has been one of the most sought-after leisure portals for many years, mainly thanks to tens of thousands of points of interest that are being updated daily. It offers a rich variety of points of interest for all types of travelers.
To expand the service and improve user access, we had to create a mobile app including tips for weekends, to attract travelers and to allow event organizers and tourism organizations to promote their services.
Unlike the website, the mobile app had to be focused on the user’s current geolocation. This allows us to show the most relevant and interesting events in their area.
We have created a mobile app with a simple user interface, that offers event filtering and map viewing, as well as the ability to start navigation. The application does not necessarily need to know the user’s location – the event can be precisely filtered from the database. The user can manually select which regions or cities he or she is interested in and make it easy to plan trips for the next weekend.
You can also browse the map manually and view the points of interest displayed in several categories
In the KudyZnudy.cz project we addressed the following key aspects:
Due to the large amount of data and specific structure of information on the web, it was necessary to come with an optimal way of communication between frequently changing annotations to hundreds of updated events per week. In addition to events, there are tens of thousands of points of interest in the database, of which twenty thousand were selected for publication as tips for weekend trips in the application.
One of the main challenges was the high popularity and attendance of the portal, which places high demands on the infrastructure and hosting providers. From the beginning, the design of the solution took into account the distribution of updates over time. The data on the mobile app is retrieved from different sources than the data on the client’s portal.
Mapotic primarily is a map platform, with versatile designs. We make it easy to quickly present any existing data and display it on the web or in a mobile app. This enabled us to configure a communication bridge that modifies the original dataset into a usable form in a mobile application.
With the mobile application, the client has not only received a regularly updated database of weekend tips for every user, but also a tool for organizers, companies and other organizations who want to support their services and promote them.
European structural and investment funds Operation programme Prague – Growth Pole Czech Republic.