Today, MapQuest, a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL), announces MapQuest Discover, one of several upcoming tools focused on the complete travel experience: discovering, planning, exploring and documenting the places where the map meets life. MapQuest Discover is part of the ongoing evolution of MapQuest’s products and services designed to help enhance a traveler’s journey.

At launch, MapQuest Discover features a social platform that encourages destination discovery through photos, allowing users to create and share collections and photos from trips they’ve taken or are currently planning.

“MapQuest Discover captures how a traveler gets inspired,” said Francis Lobo, senior vice president of AOL Services. “As one user’s collections pique another’s interest, the MapQuest Discover platform spurs continued travel and shared experiences.”

MapQuest Discover

This beta release of MapQuest Discover focuses on places, inspiring you to explore and share with customized collections of destinations in a photo or map format.

Components of MapQuest Discover include:

• Collections: a feature that allows users to create and share collections of their favorite places (“My favorite pubs” or “The Best Golf Courses in North America”), the trips they’ve been on or their bucket lists filled with places they want to go. Collections have a leaderboard which shows who’s been to the most places in that collection, encouraging good natured bragging rights (“I’ve been to 49 of the 50 states!”).
• Newsfeed: an infinite scroll of interesting places, popular collections and guides by professional travel writers to inspire you. Users can quickly Like a place, mark that they have Been to a place, or add a place to one of their own Collections. Popular collections are influenced by user’s favorites and featured higher in the news feed.
• Passport: a user’s “Passport” serves as their profile page and shows all the places a user has been, collections created, and more.
• Travel Content: access to hundreds of travel guides written by travel experts, inspiring articles about top travel destinations to help make travel planning even easier.

In addition to launching MapQuest Discover, the team is revamping MapQuest Local pages about states, cities, places, and neighborhoods to now include reviews, deals, travel guides and related collections from MapQuest Discover for more convenient trip planning.

“Since more than 84 percent of all domestic trips in the United States are taken in a car*, we believe MapQuest is perfectly suited to act as a true virtual concierge,” said Brian McMahon, General Manager of MapQuest. “This is just the beginning of a complete suite of helpful products and tools you’ll be seeing from MapQuest over the next several months to help travelers discover, plan, experience and share their journeys.”

For 16 years, MapQuest has played an instrumental role in helping people navigate the world. Today, MapQuest is the 17^th most popular mobile brand** and a top 35 website.*** With the launch of MapQuest Discover, MapQuest is extending its capabilities to not only get users where they want to go with direction and planning – but to inspire them to go there.

*AAA Travel Study 2012 http://newsroom.aaa.com/category/travel
**comScore MobiLens, September 2012
***comScore Media Metrix, September 2012

About MapQuest

MapQuest provides Internet, mobile and business solutions delivering on the promise of helping people dream, plan, share and go wherever the map meets their life. MapQuest is one of the leading mapping brands online, offering maps and directions, and reaching 37 million users in October 2012, according to comScore Media Metrix. MapQuest’s mobile solutions are compatible with a variety of mobile devices, including iPhone and Android devices. MapQuest, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL Inc, is based in Denver, Colo.