As the holiday season is approaching fast, people are rushing to online trip planners for pre-booking their trips to most sought-after holiday destinations across the globe. On the other side, folks who prefer to relish unexplored scenic beauty in their own country(especially local space) prefer to make long road trips through highways, enjoying local monuments, popular restaurants and other places of interest across their road trip.
For foreign travel trips, there are plethora of trip planners available on internet but for road trip travelers(both casual and professional), there is hardly any trip planner that provides a detailed infobase carrying local information of important places to visit, restaurants, hotels, etc.
Here comes the lifesaver for Road trip travelers: MyScenicDrives. It is an online road trip planner that aims to fill the absence of an All-In-One online destination for planning road trips. MyScenicDrives not only brings together niche local information such as important places to visit, restaurants, hotels along the journey route and other location-specific info but also lets you book your accommodation, take a car on rent or even book a flight from the site itself.
As the whole planner revolves around road trips across US and Canada, it is likely that you may visit this online planner through your smartphone while on the go. That shouldn’t be an issue as the mobile version of the site gives decent user experience on your smartphone as well. As most smartphones are GPS enabled today, you just need to choose your ‘road drive’ and upload it to your GPS for easy navigation. All maps are interactive and powered by Google.
If there are group of vehicles traveling along the way or a complete fleet of vehicles taking a road trip, you can also consider vehicle tracking systems for precise tracking and management of vehicles.
Just like any other startup, there are areas of improvement such as GUI of desktop version of the website, cross-browser compatibility(we had some issues with Google Chrome) and lack of Ajax in city/location suggestions etc. The data isn’t currently populated for every US/Canada city at the moment but that’s expected, given the fact that MyScenicDrives is still in its early stages of growth.
We found the front-end UI a little clunky but as you dig deeper into the website, you will be glad to find some good deal of local information which you would have missed otherwise. For instance, look at this description of Rim of the World Scenic Byway and you will realize the quality of information provided on this website.
Overall, MyScenicDrives aims to meet the requirements of road trip travelers and with gradual improvement in their service over time, they can certainly achieve their goal of becoming a prime website for frequent road travelers.