Road trippers, business travelers, weekend warriors – you’re booking travel already, why not book on MapQuest and see if your trip will be paid for?  Just like other travel sites, you can search, compare and book hotel rooms at thousands of chain and independent hotels around the world, including hotel specials like instant discounts, free breakfast, and more.  You’ll also have access to thousands of rental cars worldwide and airline tickets with almost all major airlines.

The only question remaining now is what you would do with all that extra cash…another vacation perhaps?  ;-)

*No purchase necessary.  Reimbursement up to $5,000.  See Official Rules to learn how to enter without a purchase.

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.

Cell service is sometimes spotty on the road, and our free Travel Blogs app was built with this in mind. You can build your blog and add photos and reviews while offline and then sync all your posts once you find internet again.

We’ve collected all of our Austin blogs on one Best of Austin page so you can join in our adventures.  You’ll find:

• Two guides from Spinner during the Austin festival for those who want to see big acts or new bands
• A foodie guide from Forkly for visitors looking to eat well
• A foodie guide from Foodspotting for those who’d like to eat on the cheap (food trucks!)
• A newbie guide for attendees coming to the festival for the first time

There will also be 5 live blogs starting at the end of the week. If you like music, bbq and shenanigans, follow along by subscribing to any or all of them:

• RVSXers – Sit shot gun with the RVSXers as they road trip in an RV from Chicago to Austin (and back).
• Jeremy – 10 days in Austin…or at least staying as long as he can handle.  Follow along to see if he makes it.
• Monika – Telling us all about The Sounds of Austin…pretty sure there will be some stories live music in this one.
• Kaitlyn – Your eyes are never bored at SXSW…as you’ll find out via Kaitlyn’s blog, The Sights of Austin.
• Anke – Foodaholics rejoice!  Anke’s blogging about yummy food trucks and awesome hidden gem restaurants in downtown Austin. Follow along and give her your suggestions for what to try and what to avoid.

No matter if you’re planning to experience SXSW in person or virtually, keep our Best of Austin guide handy.  If you are lucky enough to go, you can create your own Austin blog on travelblogs.mapquest.com or get the iPad / iPhone app here.

With our latest releases of the flagship MapQuest apps now in the App Store and Google Play, we can now check traffic conditions every few minutes as you traverse your route, and adjust on-the-fly. You don’t need to do anything: if congestion is detected and we can find a faster way around it, we’ll re-route automatically and notify you using a simple spoken instruction. You can keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

We think drivers will love the benefits of this feature: saving time and gas, reducing aggravation, and finding alternate routes even in familiar areas (try it on your commute!). And if you prefer to just crank the tunes and wait for the congestion to clear, you can easily disable traffic-based routing using Settings in either app.

Our traffic-based routing is based on INRIX data. INRIX collects more real-time traffic info from more sources than anyone else in the industry, including crowd-sourced data from commercial fleet and consumer vehicles as well as GPS-enabled mobile devices. MapQuest’s real-time traffic coverage includes over 200,000 miles of roads in North America, which is essentially all major roads in medium-to-large cities. And the coverage is even better during rush hour.

Download our free iPhone or Android app and start avoiding traffic snarls today – then tell us on Twitter or Facebook what you did with the time you saved!

Free travel blogs are the perfect way for you to seamlessly capture all of your memories from your journeys and share your adventures with friends and family.  It’s easy to set-up and add photos, stories and more, making it possible for everyone to create their very own travel blog!

MapQuest Travel Blogs is the second in a series of handy travel tools by MapQuest focused on helping you to dream, plan, experience, document and share your trips highlighting the places where the map meets your life.

Here are just some of the awesome features in MapQuest Travel Blogs:

• Easily create a blog of your adventures with photos, stories, reviews and more
• Automatically map out your entire trip
• Share your blog with friends and family via your social networks or automatic email updates so you can stay connected throughout your travels or as when you get back to cherish your journeys
• Update your blog from anywhere with the iOS app- it works offline even if you don’t have internet access and then syncs up with your website when you have wifi
• Read about and see great travel journals from others
• Ability to keep your blogs private or make them public so you can inspire others – your blog can even be featured by MapQuest or AOL in our blog of the week
• Available on web, tablet and mobile

Not traveling right now? No problem. You can get your travel juices flowing by reading about other traveler’s journeys. We have over 24,000 blogs already created, some of these are sure to get you excited about traveling.

Check out a few of our favorite blogs:
http://travelblogs.mapquest.com/runwaysandrails/runways-and-rails

http://travelblogs.mapquest.com/stacyandlee/spices-and-treks-culinary-adventures-around-the-world

http://travelblogs.mapquest.com/francislobo/maui-in-one-week

http://travelblogs.mapquest.com/daviddibardino/east-africa-with-amsterdam-en-route

Sign up today, what are you waiting for?

Happy Travels!

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:

The MapQuest Gas Prices site has been helping drivers find those best deals for years, and we’re happy to report we’ve freshened it up. The new design makes it easier for you to find gas stations sorted either by proximity or cheapest nearby, and select your preferred fuel type (premium, diesel, etc.). We’ve also used a device-responsive design so it will work better on smartphones and tablets, and streamlined updates so that prices are now refreshed up to three times per day.

Also, if you haven’t tried the free MapQuest Gas Prices apps for iPhone or Android, go to the App Store or Google Play and take them for a spin. They may just help you save some cash to pay off those holiday bills!

Drive safe, and enjoy the Holidays.

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

Helpful hints in the list view of your directions are another great addition. These maneuver notes help you find your turn or destination by providing information about landmarks nearby. The app will offer up extra advice such as “Main St. is just past King St.” or “Bruller’s Pizza is on the corner”, giving you vital context when in the thick of navigating an unfamiliar area.

On the less practical, but more fun side of things, we also made it a bit easier to change your position icon. Just tap your current icon, click ‘Change Icon’ and then you can choose a robot, tornado, unicorn, airplane, football or whatever icon makes you smile when you open the app.

Lastly, for the millions of you lucky folks that already have an iPhone 5, our app is now officially optimized for your larger screen. Great news because that means more map!

We hope you enjoy all these updates. If you don’t have the app already, get it for free from the App Store. If you do, please rate it via the App Store on your phone to tell us what you love or what you think we can improve – we always appreciate your comments!