Shareable Route Plans: A Simple, Low-Cost Feature Your Customers Will Love
Why shareable routes matter
Think about what happens after someone gets directions on your website. They look at the screen, try to memorise the postcode, maybe scribble it on the back of an envelope, then walk to the car and re-type it into their sat nav or phone. Half the time they get it slightly wrong. The other half they just give up and search again from scratch. That clunky hand-off is a UX dead end — and it's been the norm for far too long.
Goggle Places' new route sharing feature eliminates that gap entirely. When your customers plan a route on your site, they can now share it — to their own phone, to someone else's, or to a sat nav — in a single tap. The journey goes from screen to steering wheel without anyone re-entering a single character.
The UX problem you didn't know you had
If your website offers directions — to your premises, to a property viewing, to an event venue, to a delivery drop-off — you're already helping your customers. But directions that live on a webpage aren't directions that live in the car. The moment your visitor closes the browser tab, those directions are gone. Every extra step between 'I know where I'm going' and 'my car knows where I'm going' is a chance for friction, frustration, and a poor reflection on your brand.
Shareable routes fix this by giving your customers a bridge from your website to whichever device they actually navigate with. That's a genuine UX improvement — the kind users notice, appreciate, and associate with a business that pays attention to detail.
Four ways your customers can share
Text or email — One tap generates a shareable link. Your customer texts it to themselves to open on their phone, or forwards it to whoever is actually driving. The link opens the full route with turn-by-turn directions in any browser, no app install needed.
QR code — A scannable code appears on screen. Ideal for customers planning on a desktop who want to transfer the route to their phone instantly. It's also perfect for your own printed materials: pop a QR code on an invitation, a booking confirmation, or a flyer and every recipient gets one-scan directions.
Apple CarPlay — For iPhone users, the route can be pushed straight to CarPlay. No re-entering the destination on the car's screen, no hoping the in-car search picks the same road. The route arrives exactly as planned, ready to drive.
GPX file — Drivers who use standalone sat navs from Garmin, TomTom, and others can download the route as a GPX file — the universal format supported by virtually every device on the market. Plan on your website, download, transfer, drive. It's especially valuable for fleet operators distributing a specific route to multiple drivers.
Why business owners should care
Every interaction on your website either builds trust or erodes it. When a customer can plan a route to your location and send it to their car in seconds, that's a frictionless experience they'll remember. It says: this business makes things easy. For sectors like hospitality, events, estate agencies, and tourism, where visitors are almost always driving to an unfamiliar destination, shareable routes remove one of the last points of friction in the customer journey.
It also reduces the support burden. Fewer 'how do I get to you?' phone calls, fewer customers arriving late because they took a wrong turn, fewer missed appointments. The directions you provide are the directions they follow — planned once, driven exactly as intended.
Why developers will love the integration
If you've already integrated Goggle Places routing into a website or app, adding share functionality is trivial. The share endpoint is a single API call that returns a shareable link, a QR code, and a GPX download URL for any route you've generated. There's no separate service to provision, no additional authentication flow, and no heavy client-side library to ship. Full documentation and code examples are at goggleplaces.com/docs/share.
For teams using the Goggle Places drop-in widget, sharing is even simpler — it's built in. The share button appears automatically alongside the route summary. Zero extra code required.
Low cost, high impact
Route sharing is included in every Goggle Places plan at no additional cost. There's no per-share fee, no premium tier unlock, and no usage cap beyond your existing API allowance. If you're already generating routes, you can share them — it's that straightforward. And because Goggle Places is built exclusively for the UK, every shared route reflects accurate, UK-specific data: speed limits, road classifications, roundabout exits, and the kind of natural directions real drivers expect.
For businesses evaluating mapping solutions, this is the kind of feature that punches well above its weight. It costs nothing extra, takes minutes to implement, and delivers an immediate, tangible improvement to the experience you offer your customers.
Get started
Route sharing is live now for all Goggle Places users. If you're already integrated, check the share documentation at goggleplaces.com/docs/share and you could have it working in your next deploy. If you're new to Goggle Places, the free tier gives you everything you need to try it out — routing, sharing, and the full UK map — with transparent, per-request pricing when you're ready to scale.