Just a few examples of the benefits of sharing:

• Kid’s ballgame across town? Share maps to the field with their teammate’s parents
• Discover an awesome new spot for Asian food? Alert the Twittersphere!
• On a business trip? Pick a place to meet with clients and text your location to colleagues
• On vacation with the family? Tell your Facebook friends about the amazing resort you found using MapQuest Discover and booked on MapQuest.com

To share a location, simply touch the map, route marker or location pin and the new “Share” icon will appear on the left side of the info box. Select that icon, and then follow the prompts to send a link using email, text messaging, Facebook or Twitter. Once sent, the links can be opened in MapQuest.com on a desktop computer, or directly in our mobile apps – which allows the recipient to easily route from their current location. If the iPhone or Android app is not yet downloaded, we’ll show a message and link right to the App Store or Google Play.

This is just a start, and we will be expanding sharing options soon. Like our latest traffic feature that automatically re-routes you around traffic jams, sharing is just one of many innovations on our roadmap designed to help you get around and stay in touch – no matter how you live, work, and play.

Download our free iPhone or Android app today – and don’t be afraid to share!

As always, let us know what you think on Twitter or Facebook.

We had a big year at MapQuest and we wanted to thank you for being a part of it!
Here’s just a quick run down of the 2012 highlights:

Big Plans for 2013

In 2013, you’ll see us continue to improve what you’ve come to love about MapQuest, including exciting new products that move us further along in our vision for the future: to inspire your travel time, family time, free time, anytime; wherever the map meets your life.

Every month, 36+ MILLION^* of you shared the journey with us.
Looking forward to another great year with you!

Onward!
Your friends at:

So, how does this relate to the sweepstakes? Well, we want to make all of this inspiration a reality. How does a trip to Key West, FL, Las Vegas, NV, Vail, CO or San Diego, CA sound? Or 700+ instant win travel-related prizes (digital cameras, luggage, gas cards, etc)?

Enter every day between now and December 20. Remember to come back daily and share with friends as you can get a total of 190 entries to win your dream trip (not to mention one of the great instant wins). Less than a week into it, we’ve already given away more than 116 prizes!

We hope the MapQuest Discover Never Bored Sweepstakes inspires YOU and your next adventure. Good luck!

As MapQuest grows, we don’t want to just get people where they want to go. We want to inspire them to explore new places. And the way we do that is by extending our products and services to help throughout the entire trip-cycle: inspiring, planning, experiencing, and sharing travels and adventures.

Putting all these experiences together in an engaging platform will let one person’s account of their trip or a professional travel article inspire others to travel. And when they share their adventures, it will then inspire more fellow travelers.

Today we’re excited to announce MapQuest Discover. This early beta focuses on the inspiration piece of the trip-cycle by providing a photo-centric social and travel experience centered on places that people may want to explore, whether it’s for a night out, weekend trip, or vacation of a lifetime.

Users of Discover can create and share collections of favorite places (“My favorite pubs” or “The Best Golf Courses in North America”) or make bucket lists (“100 Places to see before I kick the bucket”). In addition to these user-generated collections, Discover contains travel guides written by travel experts.





MapQuest Discover’s homepage is an infinitely scrolling newsfeed of popular Places, Collections and Travel Guides. From here, users can quickly Like a Place, mark that they have Been to a Place, or Add a Place to one of their own Collections.

Collection pages include photos of all the Places in the Collection and also have a Leaderboard which shows which Discover users have been to the most Places in that Collection, providing for good natured bragging rights (“I’ve been to 49 of the 50 states!”). A user’s Passport serves as their profile page and shows all the places a user has been, collections they created, and more.





To complement MapQuest Discover and add more depth to our user’s travel planning experience, we’ve overhauled MapQuest Local. These redesigned pages about states, cities, places, and neighborhoods now contain reviews, deals, travel guides, related collections, and all the new features from MapQuest Discover.

For over 16 years, MapQuest has played an important role in helping people navigate the world. With the launch of MapQuest Discover and the overhaul of MapQuest Local, we’re excited about not just getting people where they want to go, but inspiring them to go there.

Vijay Bangaru, VP Product