16 December 2004

This Christmas and New Year There’s No Congestion Charge, and Multimap is Ensuring that Londoners Looking for Travel Directions are Fully Aware of the Good News!

The Mayor of London has suspended London’s congestion charge from 25th of December to 3rd of January inclusive. Multimap, Europe’s leading online mapping provider, is ensuring that Londoners looking for travel directions involving the 8 square miles affected by the charges are fully aware of the suspension, and can make plans accordingly.

When people search for travel directions on www.multimap.com, the company delivers a detailed map with numbered icons indicating users’ most direct and quickest route, plus a list of step-by-step travel directions. Each instruction that takes drivers through the Congestion Charging Zone is flagged with a congestion charging icon, so that drivers are aware when they are in the zone. For the period surrounding the suspension, an information box will appear at the side of the directions delivered, alerting drivers to the suspension. They can click on the box to access the www.cclondon.com site for further information*.

Mimi Parsons, advertising sales manager, said, "The congestion charge icons featured in our step-by-step travel directions are immensely helpful to a potential audience of 7.3 million people. They help people to plan and pay their congestion charge in advance of a journey; to know that those charges will be temporarily suspended will be equally helpful to them.”

*Drivers using TfL’s service can find their nearest retail outlet, petrol station or self-service machine to pay the congestion charge by visiting www.cclondon.com and clicking on the “Payment finder; where is my nearest place to pay?” button. This takes them to the “Payment Finder” service, at which point they enter their street, town or postcode; indicate whether they require disabled access; and click on the “Search” tab. A map then appears with icons representing between one and ten of the nearest outlets to the address entered, depending on the precision of that address. Users can pan N,S,E,W and zoom in/out. A list of the top ten outlets appears beneath the map in order of proximity to the user’s specified search area. This list includes full address details, opening hours, level of disabled access, and a link to a close-up map for each outlet listed.

About Multimap

Multimap is Europe's leading provider of mapping and location-based services. The company delivers more online maps, point-to-point driving directions and geo-spatial ("where's my nearest?") searches to more companies than any other supplier in Europe. All services are offered on mobile, PDA, kiosk, and interactive TV platforms and in multiple languages.

The public website, www.multimap.com, provides a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life. Key features include street-level maps of Europe, USA, Canada and Australia; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; weather forecasts; links to location information; and services such as hotel, restaurant and entertainment booking. The public site attracts over 7.3 million unique users, registers more than 140 million page impressions every month, and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the UK. Multimap recently featured in The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 league table of fastest-growing unquoted UK companies across all sectors.