Tripadvisor, one of the world’s largest online travel planning sites, has tapped into Yandex.Maps search capabilities to show customers travel destinations and tourist sights in Russia and Turkey. It is the first international Internet major to acknowledge the advantages of the mapping service of the Russian search giant.
The global company believes that with its wide choice of maps and satellite pictures Yandex.Maps offers the best online views and itineraries for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union, as well as for Turkey. Yandex.Maps is unrivaled in both elaboration and areas covered, Tripadvisor’s Konstantin Kalabin said in an exchange with the Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Tripadvisor already waved goodbye a year ago to Google.Maps a year ago and now to the Russian and Turkish maps of Microsoft Bing.
Yandex.Maps will help Tripadvisor users navigate through tourist attractions, hotels, restaurants and other objects of interest. The Russian company has provided the US-based service with its cartography API completely free of charge – an image-building move that Yandex thinks may help bring its other services to the attention of the leading travel site.
Yandex has been constantly polishing and refining its mapping service. In early October 2013, it introduced a debugged version of in-depth European maps with improved trip-routing capabilities. Just last week, the company completed a major revamp of Yandex.Maps with the launch of a unified platform supporting and updating “unlimited amounts of data without relying on external sources.”
