Background

Jeju Island is the most beautiful place in South Korea. This designated UNESCO World Natural Heritage site is a popular road trip destination to millions. More than 80% get around the island by car and rely on navigation apps to guide them. But all navigations only find the fastest route when you drive to and from locations. If you try to go off course via the coastal road, it continuously recalculates, eventually making you go back on the guided route and miss out on the beautiful scenery. It also makes everyone only take the boring in-land roads and highways, causing traffic during the high season. How can travelers experience Jeju to the fullest, even on the road? Is there a way to turn the boring car ride be into an epic journey? Can the most frequent visitors see a side of Jeju that they’ve never seen before?

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

We created Slow Road, the beautiful detour map for travelers. It gets you to your destination through the most scenic route, instead of the fastest route. Slow Road offers 50 unique routes that connect different parts of the island, each with a theme such as the road along the coast, through a field of flowers, down the old folk village, etc. This allows travelers to have a personalized experience even if they have to same starting and end point, making their time in Jeju more memorable. These alternative routes also introduce new, less-known places only the locals would know like the best bakery in town. This also helped the local economy grow while scattering travelers to locations other than the famous attractions, which made traveling safer during the pandemic.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

Every element is intuitively designed, It’s all done with a few simple clicks. When you open T-map in Jeju, a pop-up banner directs you to the Slow Road mobile page. There you can select a route, and it will automatically input the waypoints into the T-map for you. Nothing is changed on your T-map, except that a Slow Road route is recommended above the usual fastest/shortest routes. For those who are connecting from outside of Jeju or unfamiliar with Jeju's geography, just click on the map to scroll through the list of routes available from a specific location. It has a thumbnail image and waypoints in detail, convenient when planning the trip in advance or for first-time travelers.

List the results (20% of vote)

The ease of use increased the usage frequency- when people used it once, they use it several times a day, sometimes everyday while they were on the island. In addition, these new, alternative routes increased potential revisits because it encouraged people want to come back for more unexplored experiences. Since overseas travel was restricted, domestic visitors flooded into Jeju. Slow Road resolved overcrowding in famous tourist attractions, helped the local economy grow, and alleviated traffic congestion on main roads by scattering people to different parts of the island. It truly redefined social distance traveling. In the first week of its launch, Slow Road page on the Jeju Tourism Organization’s official webpage (m.visitjeju.net) gained 583% growth in traffic. The click through rate of the T-map banner ad had a 204% increase, and T-map usage rate in Jeju increased by over 36%, all in the same time frame.