Something Wonderful is Going to Happen

Shenandoah National Park is one of nearly 400 parks waiving entrances fees during National Park Week April 21-29

Early Access to Cost2Drive 2.0 for National Park Week

Here at Cost2Go we’ve been working on something for quite some time, something we think is wonderful, and we’re so eager to share it we’re not even going to wait until it’s finished (because nothing on the Web ever is).  We’re getting ready to launch an entirely new version of Cost2Drive.com, our popular trip planning application that has now been used by over 1 million people.

But before we do, we’re going to give park lovers a special sneak peak of the new site in honor of National Park Week.  We love our national parks, and during National Park Week (April 21-29) something even more wonderful is going to happen as entrance fees to all 397 national parks will be waived making it free to get in.  Unfortunately it’s not free to get to the parks, and so that’s where we come in by helping people plan their trips with our brand new national park pages.

Yellowstone National Park Page on Cost2Drive 2.0

These beautiful new pages cover the top 10 national parks that users searched for on Cost2Drive over the past 12 months, and they make it super easy to determine how much it will cost to drive to the parks based on the fuel efficiency of your car and current gas prices along your route.  They also help you save money by locating the cheapest gas at refueling points along the way (click on the gas pump icon to see the price and location) and by displaying the cheapest airfare so you can see if it’s cheaper to drive or fly to the park.

Results Page for trip to Zion National Park from Sacramento, CA

The new national park pages also display the top hotels, restaurants and attractions in (or near) the parks from TripAdvisor so you can start planning your entire trip directly from these pages, and if your favorite park isn’t among these ten, no problem. You can get all this helpful information for all 379 national parks by simply typing in the park name on the main page of Cost2Drive (note – Mount Rushmore isn’t a National Park, it’s actually a National Memorial) .

Below are links to the 10 brand new national park pages on Cost2Drive so you can plan your trip to the park in earnest and even share your plans with friends via Facebook or Twitter using our new ShareThis widget!

• Grand Canyon National Park
• Yellowstone National Park
• Yosemite National Park
• Glacier National Park
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial
• Zion National Park
• Arches National Park
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park
• Rocky Mountain National Park
• Badlands National Park

That’s all we’re going to say about Cost2Drive 2.0 for now, but we’ll be sharing much more in the coming weeks as something even more wonderful is coming –  Summer – and here at C2G we want to help you make the best of it!

What’s your favorite National Park?

Happy Parking!

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Cost2Drive iPhone App FREE For The Holidays!

Our Holiday Gift to You!  Save $1.99 Through Jan, 1, 2012.

In case you hadn’t noticed, gas prices in the US are now at an all time high heading into the week before Christmas as the price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline has  remained stubbornly above $3.00.  In fact gas prices are a full 30 cents per gallon more than last year at this time which, combined with an unprecedented hike in toll fees, makes this Christmas travel season the most expensive on record.

Rather than curse the darkness we’re going to shine a light on what it will cost to drive places this holiday season by offering up our new Cost2Drive iPhone application for free for the remainder of the year.  Whether you’re planning a trip home to visit family and friends or planning that winter vacation to the Florida beaches or Colorado ski slopes the Cost2Drive iPhone app will help you budget for the trip by showing fuel costs and save you money by locating the cheapest gas at refueling points along the way.  The app also makes it a breeze to quickly compare the cost of driving different vehicles with a simple swipe of a finger and displays the cheapest airfare so you can see if its cheaper to fly or drive to your destination.

Quickly Compare the Cost of Driving Different Vehicles With the Swipe of a Finger

The Cost2Drive iPhone app contains fuel efficiency information on over 20,000 cars and light trucks in the US going back to the 1990 model year and lets you save up to 5 vehicles in the app.  It also provides the ability to enter your own custom vehicles making it useful for owners of RVs and motorcycles as well.

Manually Enter Custom Vehicles Like RVs and Motorcycles

So we’ve built alot of value into the iPhone app, but don’t take our word for it check out some of the great reviews the app has received, including this one from CNET TV.

Visit iTunes to download the new app today for FREE and let us know what you think.  If you don’t have an iPhone, you can use our Website application to begin planning your car trips for 2012.

We wish everyone a safe and joyous holiday and a happy and prosperous New Year.

Happy Driving!

Cost2Drive Adds Autocomplete Functionality

Improves Speed, Accuracy and Comprehensiveness.

If there’s one thing we obsess about at C2G, its creating absolutely seamless experiences that delight our users, and so its with great excitement that we announce today that we’ve enabled the Google Maps autocomplete functionality on Cost2Drive just in time for Memorial Day weekend.

When we first launched Cost2Drive.com we thought we had created a pretty simple user interface to our application, and that’s been supported by all the positive feedback we’ve received.  But we’ve also noticed a pattern of feedback related to issues users were having around getting Cost2Drive to recognize certain addresses.  As we investigated this further, we discovered this is often related to one of two issues:

1. The location was not recognized by the Google Maps API
2. The user misspelled or mistyped parts of the address

These issues are further compounded by the fact that Cost2Drive is attracting a traveling audience, and as a result many of the destinations being entered are not technically geographic locations.  For example, Disney World and Disneyland have been entered over 3,000 times so far this year.  Other examples include geographically ambiguous locations like the Outer Banks in North Carolina, which used to result in an error message in our application.

Well not anymore.  Right on the cusp of the peak summer driving season we’re excited to launch this new feature which not only recognizes non-geographic locations like theme parks but also dramatically reduces the time required to enter long addresses.  This is even more helpful when accessing Cost2Drive.com from a mobile device, where every keystroke counts.

And best of all, bad spellers like myself will finally have a crutch to fall back on when entering locations.  Here’s an interesting tidbit from our search logs,  Niagara Falls is misspelled over 30% of the time its entered as a destination, but now with autocomplete never again!

Let us know what you think of the new feature.  We wish everyone a happy and safe holiday weekend and if you’re looking for some wonderful road trip ideas check out the 20 Memorable Memorial Day Road Trips we posted last year.  They’re available in Google Maps and look awesome on an iPad!

Happy Driving!