Today marks a significant milestone in the world of travel technology. We are thrilled to announce the launch of Alpaca Tech, a cutting-edge solution designed to empower developers in building sophisticated trip planners and travel guides right into their websites and mobile applications.

Alpaca Tech at a Glance

• Dynamic Itinerary Technology: Streamline the user journey with advanced route planning and itinerary optimization.
• Content Management Tools: Easily manage and curate content tailored to individual user preferences.
• GraphQL API Services: Tackle the heavy lifting of data storage and retrieval effortlessly.
• Optimized Mapping Environments: Offer stunning, interactive maps to bring your itineraries to life.

A Solution Built for Flexibility

The beauty of Alpaca Tech lies in its adaptability. Thanks to its robust suite of tools, the technology seamlessly integrates with a wide array of web and mapping technologies. Now developers can present itineraries how they want, customizing everything from look and feel to backend functionalities.

Why Choose Alpaca Tech?

1. Ease of Use: Comprehensive documentation, example code, and sandbox environments make it a breeze to get started.
2. Tech Compatibility: Works effortlessly with various web technologies and mapping platforms, giving you complete creative freedom.
3. All-In-One Solution: From content management to intricate route planning, Alpaca Tech covers it all.

Get Started Today

The technology is fully documented and available at Alpaca Tech’s official website. Dive into the comprehensive documentation, example code, sandboxes, and more to kickstart your journey into developing the next-gen travel applications.

Don’t miss out on leveraging the itinerary technology that’s powering alpaca.travel. With Alpaca Tech, the future of personalized and efficient travel planning is here. Are you ready to be a part of it?

Unlock seamless customization and integration with the newly introduced Embed Wizard for your Alpaca Travel itinerary maps.

• Multiple Layout Choices: Tailor the map’s appearance by selecting from various layout options, making it an organic part of your website.
• Advanced Customization: Go beyond basics—toggle specific UI elements, and adjust settings like height and width for a personalized look.
• Live Previews: Eliminate guesswork with real-time previews that show you how the map will appear in different web templates and on various devices.
• Embed Code Flexibility: Choose from multiple embed options, including single script tags and iframe codes, to ensure compatibility with your CMS or developer requirements.

The Embed Wizard streamlines the process of incorporating Alpaca Travel itinerary maps into your website, offering versatility and customization like never before. Enhance your site’s user experience and adapt the map to your unique needs effortlessly.

Alpaca Travel presents “Alpaca Superpowers,” a cutting-edge suite of generative AI tools designed to revolutionize the way content writers craft itineraries. With the ability to define custom writing styles and access intuitive context-aware copy suggestions, users can now build itineraries more efficiently while maintaining high-quality content. Discover the latest enhancements within the itinerary editor, powered by Alpaca Superpowers, and enjoy a seamless content creation experience.

• Develop travel-specific writing styles with presets, simple scales, or by training the AI model using example copy
• Leverage itinerary content generation tools within the editor to complement your itineraries with engaging content
• Enhance copywriting with a versatile set of content authoring tools, including applying writing styles, paraphrasing, proofreading, and suggesting/brainstorming content

Learn more about Alpaca Superpowers

Effortlessly Adapt to Various Travel Niches

Alpaca Travel’s AI Content Generation tools include a comprehensive range of presets to cater to common writing styles used by Travel Writers, Publishers, Personal Bloggers, Destination Marketers, and Government Bodies. Selecting a preset instantly adapts your content to align with the specific tone and style preferred by each niche.

For those who desire further customization, modify scales from 1-5 across various writing style attributes, and fine-tune your use of adjectives and other stylistic elements. This flexibility ensures your content stands out and accurately reflects your unique voice.

Alternatively, if you have example or aspirational copy that embodies the writing style you’re aiming for, simply provide it to the AI. The system will then analyze the sample and generate content that mirrors the desired style, making it easy to achieve a consistent, high-quality writing experience throughout your itineraries.

Power at Your Fingertips

Within the itinerary editor, Alpaca Travel offers a suite of generative content tools to streamline your content creation process.

By clicking the lightning bolt icon next to fields, you can access a menu of powerful AI-driven features, including:

1. Suggest/Brainstorm: Get tailored suggestions for various fields based on audience, genres, itinerary context, and place information. Whether you need the best times to travel, an essential gear list, or engaging titles, synopsis, and descriptions to boost engagement, the AI is here to help.
2. Rewrite and Paraphrase: Ensure your copy aligns with your chosen writing style by letting the AI rewrite and paraphrase it for you. This feature helps maintain consistency and polish across your entire itinerary.
3. Summarize, Shorten, Proofread, and Improve Readability: Refine your content with the ability to summarize or shorten longer passages, proofread for errors, and enhance readability. The AI will guide you in crafting content that is both concise and captivating, making your itineraries more accessible and enjoyable for your audience.

With these advanced content tools at your disposal, creating high-quality, consistent, and engaging itineraries has never been easier. Explore the possibilities and elevate your content creation experience with Alpaca Travel’s AI Content Generation tools.

Read more about Alpaca Superpowers

Expanding the content attributes of our itinerary editor to support your itinerary creation needs, we are pleased to introduce additional fields for enhanced content creation. With these new fields, you can add crucial details about outdoor and adventure activities, essential gear and equipment, terrain overviews, distances and durations, and the best time of year to visit.

Our aim is to help you create more comprehensive and informative itineraries that cater to the varying needs of your clients. Although currently accessible through our API, these new fields will soon be available through our front-end embeds.

We are excited to introduce a new feature to our itinerary editor that promises to take your content creation to the next level! With the addition of content suggestions and improvements, our editor now checks your content for completeness and presentation, ensuring higher quality itinerary content for your users.

Our content suggestions and improvements feature provides a form of checklist items based on the type of content you are creating. Our goal is to provide consistency and higher quality presentation of your content by helping you check your content as you author it.

We understand the importance of providing effective content to your audience, and that is why we have designed this feature to guide you through the process. As you create your content, numerous checks are performed to ensure images are attached, detail about places you’ve added is provided, and information specific to outdoor activities is included. The checks will help guide you to add the necessary detail to make your content effective.

Our content suggestions and improvements feature is available to our technical clients who are looking to create high-quality itinerary content. We understand that content creation can be a challenging task, and we are here to provide you with the support you need.

We hope you find this feature useful and look forward to seeing the amazing content you create using our itinerary editor.

We understand that navigating a new product can be overwhelming at first. That’s why we’re excited to announce the release of our new onboarding feature called “Show Me Around.” This feature is designed to guide our users through the different interfaces of our product and help them get started quickly and efficiently.

Initially, the “Show Me Around” feature will be available in our Itinerary Editor, with plans to expand to other areas of the product in the coming months. The feature is aimed at delivering tutorials and educating users on new features to improve their experience with our product.

Here are some expanded details on the “Show Me Around” feature:

• “Show Me Around” will provide a step-by-step tutorial of our Itinerary Editor, highlighting different features and functionalities.
• Users will be able to access the tutorial at any time and can follow along at their own pace.
• The tutorial will be interactive, allowing users to try out different functions and features as they learn.
• Our design team has worked hard to make the onboarding process intuitive and user-friendly, ensuring that even the least technical users will be able to understand it.

We believe that the “Show Me Around” feature will be a valuable addition to our product, helping new users feel more confident and comfortable navigating our interfaces. We hope you find this new feature useful and we’re always looking for feedback to improve our product further. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance our product to make it even more user-friendly.

We’re excited to introduce our newest feature: embedded media from popular services. With YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify Playlists, and Soundcloud Embeds, our clients can now create more engaging content.

By incorporating videos, music, and audio, you can take your content to the next level. You can also use additional resources to build walking tours or other informational content that your users will love.

Adding these features is easy. Just use the WYSIWYG editor and include a link to the content you want to embed. It’s that simple!

As always, we’re committed to providing the best possible service to our clients. That’s why we’re adding a support article to help you get started with this new feature. It will be available soon, so keep an eye out for it.

For now, this feature is only available to our paid users. We hope you’ll take advantage of it and let us know what you think.

We’re happy to let you know that we have recently implemented a new feature on our platform called oEmbed. With oEmbed, you can easily embed Alpaca Travel’s content on external websites without the need to manually copy and paste embed code. This makes it much more convenient to embed our content into your blog articles, landing pages, or other pages without worrying about technical details.

While not all websites and content management systems support oEmbed out of the box, many open source CMS platforms have plugins available to support it. Additionally, some online subscription-based CMS platforms have oEmbed built-in.

We believe that this new feature will enhance the user experience and make it easier for our community of travel enthusiasts to share their knowledge and experiences with others. We’re always striving to provide you with the best tools and services to help you create and share your travel content.

We’ve also been accepted on iframely, which is used by popular platforms. This will allow us to integrate even better with other platforms and provide a seamless experience for our users.

To learn more about the protocol, visit https://www.oembed.com/. For more details about the service on our platform, please refer to our GitHub documentation located at https://github.com/AlpacaTravel/embed-docs/tree/main/docs/oEmbed.

We are committed to delivering the best experience for our users, which is why we have made several improvements to our platform. We have fixed several issues, including missing icons or numbers in some embeds, as well as map movement issues on the map-only view. Additionally, we have introduced a placeholder image on embeds and enhanced loading skeletons across applications and embeds to provide a more consistent experience. We have also increased the height of popups on the map and images uploaded to 600w 400h to better display the visual assets attached to itineraries. We have applied various fixes to styling to tighten up the user interface and apply branding better. Lastly, we have made some updates to our map styles, including removing highway shields until zoomed in further, reducing the size of natural/waterway labels, and removing some old-style layers. These updates will improve the user experience and ensure our platform is performing at its best.

In the ever-evolving world of technology, developers are always looking for new and innovative ways to create applications that provide a great user experience. One way to achieve this is by leveraging APIs that can quickly and efficiently deliver the data that is needed. Our company has recently made significant updates to our GraphQL API and Mapping Service that will make it easier for developers to work with our platform and create exceptional travel experiences for their users.

To make our GraphQL API more accessible, we have added comprehensive documentation on GitHub. The new documentation includes getting started guides that help developers read from their itinerary or build their own itinerary creator on top of our platform. The guides provide detailed steps and code examples, making it easy for developers to get started and quickly integrate our API into their applications.

View Documentation on GitHub

In addition to the documentation, we have released several SDKs for JavaScript/TypeScript that enable developers to communicate with our API using their preferred technology. The SDKs use popular technologies such as Apollo, Fetch, and GraphQL-Request, allowing developers to communicate with our API more conveniently and effectively.

We have also updated our Mapping Service documentation on GitHub to help our Australian subscribers easily access frequently updated ATDW tiles or ABS data, as well as administrative data from Natural Earth datasets such as time zones and countries/regions. With these updates, developers can access the latest information and ensure their applications are always up to date.

By providing developers with these resources, we hope to empower them to create travel applications that are both functional and engaging. With the help of our GraphQL API and Mapping Service, developers can quickly and easily access the data they need, making it possible to create applications that provide a truly exceptional user experience. We are excited to see the innovative ways developers will use our platform and how it will continue to evolve and improve the travel industry.

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new feature on Alpaca Travel – Google Analytics integration. With this feature, users can now send page view analytics to their own Google Analytics property. This feature unlocks a whole new range of possibilities for Alpaca’s travel writers, allowing them to gain insights into their content performance, as well as better understand who is viewing their content. To enable this feature, users simply need to provide their Google Analytics Web Data Stream Measurement ID in the integrations section of Alpaca Travel. We believe this new feature will help to further empower our travel writers to create the content that their audience loves.

On supported embed modes, users can now change the embed code to load with a specific location focused on. This will help support use cases where users wish to embed their Alpaca content on separate pages on their website. We are currently releasing a support article on the changes that are required to the embed code. If this feature is popular, we may incorporate a tool to select a specific location when creating your embed code in future releases.

We have disabled the default setting of displaying ratings or reviews for businesses on Alpaca Travel. This feature may be made available in the future as an opt-in feature for travel writers to decide when it is important to show.

Alpaca Travel is excited to announce an upcoming release of its new map focused embed option. This new option will allow users to display a simplified map on their page, with basic interactions that reveal content once users interact. This new embed option is being tested with clients in order to ensure that it performs effectively for wider release.

The Alpaca Travel platform has been optimised for further performance, with concurrency provisioning, static generation strategy and new specialised hosting service partners. This results in a faster initial response time to requests, increased successful HIT rate of requests and improved performance of itineraries.

• Provisioned concurrency
  We have added additional provisioning of resources to our service architecture. This has resulted in an increase initial response time to requests that fall through our CDN’s.
• Static generation strategy
  We have switched from our primary strategy (Server-side Rendering “SSR” and CDN cache headers) to a new strategy (Incremental Static Generation “ISG”). This increases the performance of our CDN’s globally by largely serving static content.
• New hosting partner
  We have shifted part of our architecture to a specialised provider with increased performance options for our application.

Alpaca Travel has also implemented website “vitals” tracking in order to monitor and improve the user experience metrics over upcoming releases.

Alpaca Travel is excited to announce a new code examples section on our website! This section will showcase different ways to display itinerary data using various mapping technologies. We hope this will inspire developers and agencies to create new and innovative ways to interact with our platform. Stay tuned for more examples to be added in the future!

• Alpaca Travel has launched a code examples section to assist developers displaying itinerary data directly within mapping technologies.
• The section will show different technologies, such as Mapbox, Google Maps, and Leaflet.
• Alpaca takes care of hosting and updating the mapping data in various supported and optimised formats, such as vector tiles or GeoJSON.
• More advanced use cases can access further data from the platform via GraphQL API.
• These services make it possible for UX designers and developers to imagine new ways to interact and engage with itineraries, without the hassle of managing the data or building tools on the side for users to create content.

Users now have the option whether a ‘Download PDF’ option will be shown on supporting embeds. Users can specify their own PDF or leverage a generated version. By default, the ‘Download PDF’ options will now not be shown on embeds.

To enable the Download PDF button on supporting embeds, find the option under “Enhanced Content” -> “Extras”.

Alpaca Travel has introduced a new ‘duplicate’ feature for itineraries

• Aimed to make it easier for authors to create variations of an itinerary
• To duplicate an itinerary, click on the ellipses next to an itinerary card, and select the duplicate option
• You will be presented with a screen to customise the title, and also choose an alternative language if necessary

Alpaca has updated its platform to include internationalisation capabilities. This means that when users create itineraries, they can select from a list of languages. When viewing content, various user interface text elements will be translated to align with the itinerary language selected.

• Alpaca has added internationalisation capabilities to their platform
• When creating itineraries, content authors can select from a list of languages
• Various user interface text elements will be attempted to be translated to align with the itinerary language
• Alpaca have created translations for a number of initial languages
• Additional languages will be considered upon request
• This also extends to the map, but please note that due to limited language support of mapping providers, the underlying base map may show different labels

Initial translation languages include: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Have an additional language? Get in contact with us.

As part of the launch for Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) integration into the new Itinerary Editor, a new way of presenting business details has been developed in order to maximise the presentation of information.

• Alpaca recently launched the new integration for the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse.
• Users viewing business are shown information in a series of neatly organised tabs.
• The tabs allow for more detailed information to be shown to the user, without overwhelming the user experience.
• Key information is summarised up to the primary tab, to assist making information more digestible and actionable.
• The interfaces also reveals more information about accessibility and indigenous information.

We’ve just made a great new enhancement to our “Travel Segments” feature- optional colour assignment!

This new enhancement will help travel writers communicate their itineraries more effectively, and also help other users view and follow those itineraries more easily.

With this new feature, travel writers can now choose to assign colours to their segments, which can help represent different groupings or types of information.

We’ve also introduced a new colour ‘contrast’ choice, to improve accessibility and enable users to select lighter colours without losing any detail.

Try out this new feature now and make your itineraries more visually effective and easier to follow!

Alpaca Travel is excited to announce the launch of their new integration with the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW). This new feature allows users to easily create Itineraries by plotting businesses from the database along their journey.

• Alpaca Travel has launched a new integration with the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse
• The integration allows users to create itineraries by searching and plotting businesses from the database
• As information is updated about the business, this information is automatically updated on the itinerary
• The feature is available to our “pro” subscribers that have an API Key for the service now

We are excited to announce that we have launched a new itinerary editor! This new editor has numerous tools and capabilities to travel writers that improve the ease and speed of creating travel content. The new itinerary editor addresses numerous feature requests, as well as providing a host of new advanced features for authors.

The new itinerary editor can output content that can be directly shown within our subscribers existing guides. Additionally, Alpaca will be launching new ways to display itineraries as well as launching their GraphQL API in the next few months to enable clients to better create and display their itineraries.

Alpaca will be working with existing “pro” level subscription clients to onboard them on to the new platform.

Alpaca Travel is excited to announce our new integrations feature! This feature allows users to connect and leverage other applications to enhance their experience on Alpaca.

The first integration we are featuring is with the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse. This integration enables content authors to access detailed place information from tens of thousands of tourism businesses across Australia.

We will be planning to release additional integrations as we enhance the capability to communicate with other tools and platforms.

Today we are launching Google and Facebook sign-in options for users to register and authenticate into our platform.

• Use Google or Facebook to log in to our application
• No need to create and supply us credentials in order to use the application
• In addition to making the sign-up and sign-in process easier, you don’t have to maintain your account details or keep track of additional passwords

You will see these options added to the application login and register screen

Today we are adding additional features designed to enhance the security of our platform.

• Publishing a Content Security Policy (CSP), as well as other enhanced security headers
• Integrating a CSS Font-face Service
• Introducing 2 new authentication options for Google and Facebook

Content Security Policy provides a definition to web browsers of what connections are considered permitted and what is not. This reduces the potential for unwanted 3rd party code to be included with content

CSS Font-face service is designed to remove CSS rules contained within 3rd party self-hosted fonts that could affect the presentation of content

Google and Facebook authentication options provide our users options to avoid creating additional credentials on our application. Our authentication services are managed via Amazon “Cognito” product.

Alpaca will continue to focus on improving overall application security opportunities.

We have streamlined the way that you can upload and assign icons to various locations.

• Quickly assign icons to locations on your itinerary
• Click on the icon beside the itinerary location to make changes

This feature makes it more convenient and quicker for our users to assign icons across a number of locations appearing on their itinerary. The existing methods of selecting an icon will still be supported.