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 to 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 use the boring roads and highways, causing traffic congestion during the high season.

How can travelers experience Jeju to the fullest, even on the road? In other words, is there a way to turn the boring car ride be into an epic journey?

Big data played a crucial role in the making of Slow Road.

First, through collecting data from Jeju Data Hub and web crawling, we located 65,000 point of interests in Jeju and divided the island into 7 sections accordingly. Then we extracted 10,000 with the highest preference and awareness. This was mashed up with data from a web portal site, queried for gender, age, period, weather, time, etc.

We took quantitative data (geographical location, scenery, etc.) with qualitative (related key words, hashtags, etc.) data, to create 50 routes, each with a special theme. All routes go from one section to all other sections, evenly covering the entire island, offering a wide selection of scenic routes that cater to every traveler.

To ensure road safety, we test-drove each route, followed by 2 weeks of beta testing to optimize user experience.

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, or down the old folk village. The alternative routes also introduced new, less-known places only the locals would know like the best bakery in town.

It also helped scatter travelers to locations other than the famous attractions, which made traveling safer during the pandemic.

Slow Road identifies your current location and shows you routes that lead to your desired destination. When you open T-map in Jeju, a pop-up banner directs you to the Slow Road mobile page. Select a route of your choice, and it will automatically input the waypoints into the T-map for you.

If you’re outside of Jeju or unfamiliar with Jeju, you can click on the map to scroll through the list of routes available from a specific location. It also has a thumbnail image and waypoints in detail, which is convenient to plan your trip in advance.

Since overseas travel was restricted due to Covid, domestic visitors flooded into Jeju more than ever before. Slow Road set a new norm for traveling during the pandemic. How? It resolved overcrowding in famous tourist attractions and alleviated traffic congestion on main roads by scattering people to different parts of the island. We saw an increase in the rate of potential revisits as these new, alternative routes encouraged people to come back for more unexplored experiences.

Slow Road was featured on national news channels and newspapers, earning a PR value of $168,074 with 0 paid media, in the first week of its launch. In the same time period, Slow Road page on the Jeju Tourism Organization’s official webpage (m.visitjeju.net) gained 583% growth in traffic, and 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.