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.