Adding a map view to my side project changed the product more than months of prompt engineering

I've been building a free AI travel tool called Explorer AI for about 6 months now. The core of it is you answer about 20 questions about how you actually travel; budget, pace, dietary stuff, group type, how active you want your days, etc and it generates personalised ideas across things to do, see, eat and experience. I built a curated database of thousands of places across 250+ cities so it's not just hallucinating restaurants that don't exist.

The feedback from our few hundred users has been really positive on the quality of ideas. But ideas on their own are just a list. You can save them and organise them into a day-by-day itinerary, but there was no spatial context to any of it. You couldn't see what was near what, or how far anything was from your accommodation.

So I just shipped a map view. Once you've saved your trip, you can open a map that plots all your ideas as pins around your accommodation. You can see what clusters together, what's walkable, what's on the other side of the city and relate everything to where your accommodation is to suit how people actually travel.

The part I think actually matters though is you can add your own ideas manually and they show up on the same map. Nobody plans a trip from one source. You're always pulling from friends, Reddit, Instagram, blogs, whatever - and trying to figure out where everything actually is relative to each other. Having all of that in one place on a map with distances from your hotel is the kind of context that makes planning a day way easier.

Still very much in development and iterating. It's free if anyone wants to have a go: Explorer AI

Keen to hear if anyone else has found that adding a spatial or visual layer to their product shifted how people used it. That's been my experience but curious if it's common.