Getaround’s Success: Powering Seamless Car-Sharing Experiences with Woosmap

Getaround at a Glance

Getaround makes carsharing simple, helping drivers find, book, and access vehicles quickly and reliably from their phone. Most cars on the platform are connected with embedded devices, so their precise location can change from one rental to the next.

That makes location absolutely central to the experience. Drivers rely on the app to guide them to the exact vehicle, often in dense city streets or complex parking areas. If they cannot find the car, it does not just cause minor frustration. It can mean delays, cancellations, and disrupted travel plans.

From browsing nearby cars to navigating to the pickup spot, every step depends on fast, accurate, and up-to-date mapping.

When Mapping Is Mission-Critical, Change Feels Risky

Because maps sit at the heart of the journey, changing mapping providers affects everything: search, discovery, conversion, user trust, and even internal team velocity.

For years, the Google Maps Platform, enriched with Getaround’s own POI database, was a reliable part of the stack. But rising costs and the need for more long-term flexibility and budget predictability pushed the team to explore alternatives.

The brief was simple but demanding: reduce spend and gain strategic flexibility, without compromising the user experience.

Finding the Right Fit

Before committing to a new partner, the teams looked at several paths.

As a product-led company with strong internal capabilities, Getaround briefly considered extending its in-house setup, especially around autocomplete. The idea was to combine:

• open-source map rendering
• Getaround’s internal POI data
• and an open-source or paid autocomplete service

to create a hybrid solution, partly in-house and partly external.

On paper, it was attractive. In practice, the trade-offs appeared quickly. Stitching multiple components together, handling edge cases at scale, and maintaining high-quality global coverage would require ongoing investment in something that was not core to Getaround’s mission: helping people rent cars, not building mapping infrastructure.

So the team ran a structured benchmark of nearly ten providers.

The bar was high. Any alternative had to match Google’s core capabilities (autocomplete, geocoding, map display, distance calculation) while offering a smoother day-to-day developer experience and a more sustainable, predictable cost model.

Woosmap quickly stood out.

“We experienced zero friction across autocomplete, geocoding, and map display. Conversion rates stayed excellent, and the switch was seamless for users.”

A Smooth Migration with Zero Business Impact

A few months after the decision was made, Getaround migrated its mapping stack from Google Maps to Woosmap. Despite the complexity of the project, the rollout was clean:

• No disruption for users
• No dip in conversion
• Same quality of mapping experience end-to-end

From a business continuity standpoint, Getaround got their number-one requirement: everything worked as expected from day one.

Developer Experience That Actually Felt Better

Beyond the user-facing success, the migration was a strong internal win. The tech teams found Woosmap straightforward to implement, and the support made a real difference.

“My teams were impressed by how easy Woosmap was to implement. Their support was highly responsive and expert. They acted as a real partner in solving our technical challenges.”

The combination of solid APIs and sharp, proactive help meant no long debugging marathons or delays, just a confident, steady migration.

The Build vs Buy Question

Before the migration, Getaround already had a hybrid model: Google Maps, complemented by its own POI data. Extending that further with more in-house components was tempting, but the deeper the teams looked, the clearer the trade-offs became.

Building and maintaining a fragmented mapping stack would demand:

• significant engineering time
• constant monitoring and tuning
• ongoing work to keep global coverage and quality high

All of that would pull focus away from what really moves the business.

Once Woosmap had proven itself on performance, coverage, and support, the choice became pragmatic:

“Given the overall quality of service and expertise demonstrated by Woosmap, we made the pragmatic decision to move everything to them and focus on our core business.”

Instant Savings, Long-Term Stability

The financial upside was immediate and meaningful. By switching to Woosmap, Getaround:

cut mapping spend by more than 50%

moved to an annual license model

secured a stable, predictable budget

Growing with Confidence

This wasn’t just a successful technical project: it was a strategic upgrade. Getaround now has more flexibility in its mapping stack without compromising quality, and can evolve its location experience with confidence.

A migration that started as a pragmatic decision ended up exceeding expectations.

Why Woosmap?

For Michael, the takeaway is straightforward:

“A complex migration, but mission accomplished. Woosmap gave us seamless continuity, a better developer experience, and major savings, without compromising on quality.”

And as Michael put it best:

“Thank you to my teams and the Woosmap team for their support. This move gives us more flexibility going forward, and the results speak for themselves.”