What 3 Words

BY Neil Etherington | Tuesday, June 7, 2022 | News

Kingfisher Chauffeur Services now uses what3words to accurately locate any address or location in the UK.

Street addresses weren’t designed for our modern world. They aren’t accurate enough to specify precise locations such as building entrances and many rural locations. This makes it hard to find places and prevents people from describing exactly where they are.

Now customers can add 3-word addresses to be picked up and dropped off at exactly the right place meaning a smoother journey for them and increased efficiency for our chauffeurs too. This can also be especially useful when picking up from busy venues, for example Epson Racecourse, where our chauffeur shared his carpark location with our customer which greatly assisted them in locating him.

What3words divided the world into 3 metre squares and gave each square a unique combination of three words. It’s the easiest way to find and share exact locations.

We have implemented what3words because UK post codes cover large areas and houses aren’t always easy to find in remote places, often with no mobile telephone coverage to contact passengers. Customers can now use what3words when booking and we also use it to make it clearer to drivers where they need to be. What3words also seemlessly integrates with Google Maps & Navigational Apps such as Waze, to make navigation to specific points really easy.

What3words is a proprietary geocode system that is designed to identify any location with a resolution of 3 metres (9.8 ft). What3words encodes geographic coordinates into three dictionary words; the encoding is permanently fixed.

What3words has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API that enables bidirectional conversion between what3words addresses and latitude/longitude coordinates. As the system relies on a fixed algorithm rather than a large database of every location on earth, it works on devices with limited storage and no Internet connection.

Founded by Jack Waley-Cohen, Mohan Ganesalingam, and Michael Dent, what3words was launched in July 2013. Sheldrick and Ganesalingam originally conceived the idea after Sheldrick, working as a concert organiser, struggled to get equipment and bands to musical events on time due to inadequate address information.

Each what3words language uses a word-list of 25,000 words (40,000 in English, as it covers the sea as well as land). The lists have been manually filtered to take account of word length, distinctiveness, frequency, ease of spelling and pronunciation to reduce any confusion.

When you book our car service you can just sit back and relax. Whether you’re going somewhere new, need to get to a specific entrance or travelling to a remote venue, what3words makes it easy to arrive exactly where you need to.

Click here to learn more www.what3words.com/pretty.needed.chill