Every route is an adventure — by the ways helps you find hidden places along the route.
Save yourself days of research and create cool routes for road trips in just a few minutes.
• Route planning that is fun
• Places within your time budget
• Suggested goals in real time
• Route planning away from the crowds
• Discover new things in real time
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Hi, I am Johannes from by the ways.
We recently discovered Travel Massive and are excited to enter into an exchange with other travel industry professionals.
We created by the ways (www.bytheways.io/en) because we were tired of the terrible planning experience you have when traveling with a car. Most travel involves at least some car portion, be it with your own or a rental car. In theory that is great because it gives you the freedom to explore a large area and to reach locations that are off limits to other travelers at your own pace. In practice it devolves quickly into an annoying back and forth between navigation systems, barely accessible local websites and travel operators geared towards big city visits.
We let you overcome these hurdles in our app where we show you the best places along the entirety of your route, how far (and crucially how long of a drive) they are from your route, what nearby places they can combined with, a wealth of information linked to the place etc.. in short all you need in a tool for the adventurous car traveler.
👉 Let us know a car trip with your start and destination (optionally some interests) and we can provide some recommendations in the comments.
And finally we have a B2B-offering for trip content as well, currently mostly for car rental companies, that we could present upon interest here (or just contact us if you have a more concrete idea).
Learn more about our trips and thoughts on our blog — www.bytheways.io/en/blog
Just did a trip through Spain and ran into the same issue. Google Maps and most blogs/ online advice is either too mainstream (the usual top 5) or some hyper-personal diary that’s impossible to follow. will definitely try it.
fyi, the link to bytheways.io in here is broken. You may want to ensure the root domain redirects to www to handle that.
good catch, thanks for spotting
Why limit it only to car trips? Why couldn't your app work well also for other kinds of journeys - like cycling? :)
Do I see correctly, that it only works on mobile?
Do you think the cycling community would want such a tool (instead of Komoot etc...) ? We think the value proposition of taking travel time into account is much stronger for car trips as you're covering much more area, are less limited in the types of roads you can (enjoyably) travel on. And yes the app is on mobile / tablet only
If your tool had a good or even better algorithm for finding interesting places along the way, why wouldn't I use it? :) Travel time - of course, but isn't it all about proportions? And a cyclist also has their own assumptions and goals for the trip - just like a car driver :)
Good luck :)
This is conceptually the same as Roadtrippers
In general I really like the idea and am glad to see another player in the space trying their hand at it.
I installed the app and tested a few routes to see how it performed.
1. It doesn't do anything useful in Australia. I entered a road trip from Melbourne -> Canberra -> Jarvis Bay and it couldn't find a single thing to see along the way. In the Explore tab I also entered Canberra as a weekend trip. It suggested I visit the Opera House and a bunch of other very high profile attractions in Sydney. It also indicated that the Opera House was 16,000 kms away. No idea what that distance is from because it's not the distance from Canberra or my current location. I'd suggest not adding distances in unless you know the user's location. I suspect this is the distance from Berlin or some such?
2. I figured your Europe data would be much better. And absolutely it did perform much better for a trip from Berlin -> Paris. Since Roadtrippers is predominantly US focussed, having a Europe focussed app is a great distinguishing factor.
3. Some localisation issues. The tab at the bottom shows "100 Orte"
4. A web app would be great. A lot of travel planning still happens on the web, especially diving into maps, etc.
5. Performance left something to be desired. It took much longer to return results than I would have expected, even accounting for some latency trying this from Australia.
6. Found the animation of the POI description a bit unnecessary. And the font a bit small for comfortable reading on a phone.
Hope the feedback helps and all the best in building this out more.
Hi Peter,
thank you very much for the detailed feedback and you're right that we haven't full support for Australia yet, (currently Europe / North America). Let me address your points.
1. By default the search is along the road network with travel times etc. (where we haven't ingested the data for Australia yet) but you also can search by distance along the route (which is what Roadtrippers does) if you go to the settings slider in the route screen. So using that I found for your route (ignoring the cities and just picking from my own interests) Seymour Railway Heritage Centre, an inland submarine (Otway), some botanical gardens (Benalla, Albury), national parks (Chiltern-Mount Pilot, Jerrawangala) and a river swim at Deigthons Beach. Happy to hear if these places would be interesting to you too, or if there are must-see places that you would put on this list etc.
2. So the main differentiator we see to Roadtrippers is traveltime instead of just distance from the route. Of course our home market is Europe and it doesn't hurt to have a competitor not active in it at all, but our second-biggest country in terms of users is the US.
3. Something other than that too? This fix will hopefully soon get in the app/ play store.
4. A sore point for us, we're aware. I think you get the best map experience (and bigger fonts) on a tablet but the discoverability / accessibility would certainly be much better.
5. Not to be lazy, but I am certain that 90% is latency. There is quite a bit of back and forth to servers which isn't always obvious. When we enter the Australian Market officially we will have servers closer by.
6. Noted!
Localisation was mainly also noticeable on the web where it's all in German.
If someone doesn't speak German, they may not realise that they need to click on "Sprache" to change the language. Using a flag icon is more universally understandable, even if that doesn't strictly map to languages of course. But even so after clicking to English, the blog posts showing on the home page are in German.
I don't recall seeing anything else in the app actually
One big issue with the search in Australia is that when I choose my route, i just end up with a message that says "I see nothing .. absolutely nothing". Clicking on the map icon does show the route though. I see some options to change the distances, but they are all behind a paywall and well, I'm only testing so not going to do that sorry :)
As for speed, I'm talking like 9/10 seconds to update the route to Berlin -> Paris . We're far away, but we're also not THAT far away ;) At the very least there should be some kind of loading indicator while it's updating the route. This was when changing one or both of the stops on the route rather than creating a new one.
Fair point, I added a language icon to the drop down on our website. I thought I had the links pointing to the english version as well but I must have made a mistake then.
With the distances from the route, the smaller ones should be free, but maybe it wasn't in the last Android release? Either way, yeah don't get premium for travel in Australia (yet). If you want send me a message with the email you've signed up with and I'd be happy to give your account access.
FYI We've added Australia (and New Zealand) data
Totally up my alley, especially if great coffee shops and delicious local eats are listed.