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Today, location matching spans various use cases across data, address, contextual, and spatial alignment.
It sits at the core of any organisation in which location plays a part in the buying, selling, or decision-making process for either an end-user or the organisation itself.
Yet, despite its importance, location matching is often left behind.
At TravelTime, we are making truly accurate location matching a reality — delivering millions of journey time calculations to applications across the globe in real time, every day.
Our mission is simple but transformative: to make accurate, scalable location matching the standard for every application where location matters.
Types of Location Matching
There are several types of location matching:
Data Alignment
This type of location matching focuses on ensuring data sets are compatible and correctly formatted, such as aligning projections or data schemas.
Address Alignment
Address alignment reconciles variations in address formatting, misspellings, or mistakes, for example, "123 Main St" and "123 Main Street". This is supported by geocoding.
Contextual Alignment
This matching is based upon demographic or other contextual factors, appending demographic or other context-specific data. For example, connecting population data or socioeconomic data to a location.
Spatial or Geo Matching
Spatial matching has a particular focus on how locations connect, interact, or relate, for example, based on how far apart locations are or the time it takes to travel between them.
TravelTime’s core strength lies in spatial matching. Our API instantly calculates the time it takes to travel between locations via various modes of transport to support time-based location matching and smarter ranking.
TravelTime’s time-based location matching is fast, accurate, available globally, and highly scalable.
The Problem with Location Matching Today
Despite the proliferation of apps like Google Maps, Waze, and CityMapper delivering hyper-precise location insights for individual users, organisations using location data to build location-based products face significant challenges.
Organisations are forced to make trade-offs between scalability, performance, cost, and accuracy when trying to address location-based challenges. The core issues are often overlooked, hidden behind layers of short-term fixes and fragmented solutions.
Location matching often forces a series of compromises:
- Accuracy vs. Scale: Ensuring precision becomes exponentially harder as data volumes grow
- Performance vs. Cost: High-performance and high-volume solutions often come with unsustainable price tags
- Outdated Methodologies: Many tools rely on rigid, outdated systems that fail to capture the dynamic, real-world complexity of location data
This forces organisations to choose between scale, cost, performance, and accuracy—an impossible decision for those building innovative solutions.
How Organisations Address These Challenges
As a result of poor location matching technology, organisations adopt a patchwork of solutions that fail to address the root problem.
These makeshift strategies might include:
Mix-and-Match Tools
Using a combination of software and data sources, leading to inefficiencies and inaccuracies.
Overcompensation
Overspending on hardware, data processing, or manual intervention in an attempt to bridge the gaps.
Settling for "Good Enough"
Organisations will compromise on performance or accuracy to stay within budget or timelines, resulting in underperforming products.
For example, many applications rely solely on map tiles and pins to communicate location. While this is common, the problem with maps is that they bring no additional value to the end user—simply showing a marker only validates the location without providing any additional context to support better matches.
These approaches don’t solve the core issue in location matching. Instead, they mask it. They leave organisations stuck in a cycle of limited capabilities, higher costs, and inaccurate results.
TravelTime: The Solution to Location Matching
At TravelTime, we are breaking the cycle of limited capabilities, higher costs, and inaccurate results. By focusing on accuracy at scale, we provide a solution that eliminates compromise, empowering organisations to achieve their goals and build better location-based applications.
We want to make organisations aware of the hidden constraints that they are facing and unlock the full potential of location data.
By addressing the real-world challenges of scale, performance and accuracy, we enable our customers to build solutions that deliver true value. And the cost? We believe in fair fixed pricing that allows you to grow. We never charge PAYG or by usage, instead we work with you to find a price that works for your performance needs.
Discuss with our team or Developers can get started with our API for free .