Golf Zoo's interactive area maps can make golf vacation planning a whole lot easier.
If you’re a full or partial do-it-yourself golf vacation planner and you’ve never been to a particular destination before, one of the most difficult, time consuming — yet, mission critical — tasks is figuring out where things are in relation to one another.
For example, it’s easy to book a room at a hotel because it’s offering deeply discounted rates, but will you really be happy with your decision if you have to drive 25 traffic-choked miles to get to the golf courses you want to play?
Websites like MapQuest and Google Maps can help, but you could literally spend hours plugging addresses into them and toggling back and forth between hotel and golf sites. We recently came across a nifty tool that largely eliminates this problem.
You can find it on Golf Zoo, a Maryland-based provider of golf vacation packages to many popular spots in the USA. Its Interactive Area Maps feature shows you all the important landmarks — golf courses, hotels, airports, major highways — in a given area on one clear, easy-to-read map.
The maps have the familiar look of Google, which powers the application, and you can do all the useful things that you’re used to, such as dragging, zooming and switching to an overhead satellite view.
Each landmark type is noted by a different colored pushpin whose number matches up with a place name in the right margin (sortable by category). If you click on a pushpin, a bubble pops up with that place’s address, photos, directions to or from, even comments from other people.
Granted, Golf Zoo’s maps don’t always list every golf course in a given area, but they do a good job of pointing out many of the most popular ones, making the maps a handy tool that can help you start to build a great golf vacation.
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