The Foursquare API has become the de facto standard when it comes to plugging into location data on the world around you, but as Foursquare has grown the dataset has apparently become more and more messy. To bring more value to their homegrown dataset, Copenhagen-based Everplaces is now slowly opening up their dataset to third parties, like hotels and the travel industry, to plug into more curated location data.
Everplaces’s curated recommendations also include “expert recommendations” sourced from locals in each city, giving tips to find restaurants and other locations.
“The deal is that insider tips are the hottest asset in the travel space, and we’re now making it possible for hotels etc. to access these and use them as a differentiating factor,” says Tine Thygsen of Everplaces.
The first company they’ve opened their dataset up to is Spanish holiday apartment site Migoa, who have switched from Foursquare to Everplaces.
“We felt adding restaurants and local info to our hotel maps would help customers select the right property. Initially we went for a Foursquare integration but found our maps had just too many locations, and that many were of low quality, being check-in data rather than actual recommendations” explains Oriol Blasco, CEO of Migoa.
It’s good to see Everplaces do more with their platform, because it seems to have potential. Their apps and web service is nicely designed, and it makes sense to essentially open up their platform for more uses.
“We still believe strongly in bookmarking and private sharing, but have learnt that our users want crowd sourced content too. To ensure quality, we filter content multiple times and multiple ways, so what you ultimately see is only around 1% of our data”
