Rome2Rio, like many other companies, has identified new regions where it wants to improve its service... but the trigger has come from an unusual source.
Tanel Tammet, a computer scientist and professor at the Tallinn University of Technology, created SightsMap, a tool that maps the Panoramio photographs taken across the world on a Google Map.
In the heat map - dark areas represent locations that have few photos, red areas have more and the yellow areas have a large number of geo-tagged photos.
Clicking on hottest places on the heat map displays the Panoramio photos at the location, Streetview, information from Wikipedia,Wikivoyage, Foursquare and Google plus articles about the location.
Tammet launched the tool on January 2012, and since then many new features have been added, including the ability to plan a trip.
What Rome2Rio did on this SightsMap is interesting. It found a correlation between the visual representation of photo spots with its train, bus and ferry transport coverage.
The company says in its blog:
"That’s not surprising; regions with developed transport infrastructure are also more likely to be visited and photographed. We have also focused on improving our coverage in popular tourist areas."
The company overlaid its Rome2Rio transport coverage map over the SightsMap heatmap in an effort to identify areas that are rich in photographs, but lacks in Rome2Rio coverage
The final combined map is below, click on the map to view in high resolution.
After looking at the final map, the company identified Cuba, Puerto Rico, Iceland, Jamaica, coast of the Black Sea, northern Pakistan, Taiwan, the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, northern Algeria and northern Tunisia as the regions to improve in transport coverage.