The Importance Of What 3 Words

To improve our customer service even further, we have updated the “check availability” contact forms on our website to add a What 3 Words location for your pickups. This is more precise than just a postcode – some postcode regions are very large and not as precise as the 3-metre-square location that What3Words gives. This addition to the booking process helps us to avoid delays in collecting from your chosen location.

The Importance Of What 3 Words

We use the What 3 Words app to complement our existing location technology. It helps us to navigate to those hard-to-find addresses and off-grid locations. It is also very useful tool when a building has multiple entrance and exit points as we can ensure we arrive at precisely the right place, every time.

The way What3words works is by dividing the world up into a grid of three-metre by three-metre squares. Every location is then given an identifier made up of three words. Entering ///petal.maybe.bunny, for example will take you to the Manchester Arena. But if you want to be picked up from the entrance you can be more specific and enter ///line.broker.units; or ///entry.snow.mixed so we are directed to the artist’s entrance located at the rear of the venue.

By being precise with locations in this way our drivers can avoid many of the challenges that come with using street addresses and postcodes. A postal address will often drop the GPS pin right in the centre of a building – which can make it difficult at airports or hospitals with multiple entrances to identify where to collect you – and often the designated pick-up point is not located at the place that satellite navigation directs you to. In fact, only a third of postal addresses lead directly to the front door of the building concerned, with the majority identifying just a part of a street or a general area.