Fledgling UK travel start-up PitchUp has secured what could be an interesting partnership in its early days after collaborating with TomTom, Â Europe’s biggest satellite navigation firm.
Vistors to the site with a TomTom device can send the location and details of any of the site’s 5,000 properties (such as campsites, caravan parks) or an equal number of points of interest from around the UK and Ireland.
The “Add To TomTom” functionality works by opening the user’s satnav’s desktop tool on its host computer and automatically placing the relevant content onto the device.
Managing director Dan Yates says having the properties and points of interest already geo-coded means it is easier for satnav devices to plot the locations easily.
The deal with TomTom is not restrictive and PitchUp will be able to partner with other satnav providers such as Garmin. Yates says at this stage TomTom is not highlighting the PitchUp partnership on its own site, but there may be an opportunity to do so in the future.
The move is the first in what PitchUp hopes will be a series of initiatives over the coming months to boost its functionality and push the business to a wider audience.
Yates says the next major project will be to add payment functionality to the site. PitchUp currently refers users to the property owner.
The various difficulties of adding transactional requirements into the site (arranging supplier protocols and availability feeds, to name but a few)Â will be completed before any territorial expansion into mainland Europe is put in place.
It’s not that often that I say this but I was so glad to find Pitchup in July when looking for camping sites for our trip up the Yorkshire coast. There are a number of camping sites out there but they were built in the 1990s and lack search and quality (up-to-date) information.