This travel app shows all the places worth exploring on a map

A true digital travel companion, this French tourism app focuses on the points of interest of different sites.

There is no shortage of apps dedicated to tourism on smartphones. There are several hundred in the “travel” category on the Google and Apple app stores. One of them, however, stands out from all the others. It is called “Around us”. As its name does not indicate, it is a very French application. “Around us” means “around us” in English and it is a model of what can be obtained today by combining artificial intelligence, for the creation of an application, and freely accessible data from more than 300 sources around the world.

“Around Us” is a digital travel companion that shows on the map all the places worth exploring. Each site is represented in a circle of varying size, depending on its interest. You can therefore visually choose this point, in an instant, which was also the initial idea of ​​the creator of Around Us, Jean-François Pillou, who was also at the origin of the site “comment ça marche”, 25 years ago. His goal is to facilitate discovery, not to miss the essential, but also to discover hidden treasures, without using paper tourist guides.

You’re going to tell me that you just have to use Google Maps, which already offers it. That’s true, but Google Maps and most other dedicated applications display a lot of useless information. In the case of Google Maps, merchants, post offices, etc. This can be practical, but it mainly hinders the search for points of interest. In “Around us”, only these points are visible and there were already 14 million of them at the launch, a year ago, in 2023. You can also apply filters and only display, for example, waterfalls, lighthouses or remarkable trees… The more you zoom in, the more you see around you with, in large cities, immersive 3D flyovers of great beauty.

We often hear the adage “if it’s free, you’re the product”. This is not the case with “Around us”. Jean-François Pillou acknowledges that there is no economic model behind the application to begin with. The proof is that you don’t need to register to use it. However, you do have to pay the hosting fees for the application, even if they are limited to the bare minimum. For the carbon footprint, the eco-responsible desire is clearly assumed and displayed. Since users asked to also be able to find hotels and restaurants, Jean-François Pillou took over the development and has already added 1.5 million with reservation options and the beginnings of an economic logic.