Multimap, Europe’s leading online mapping provider, today announced the deployment of its online mapping services for the National Trust, the charity which seeks to conserve and protect the coastline, countryside and buildings of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Thanks to the new service, visitors to www.nationaltrust.org.uk can access street-level maps showing the location of sites of interest in a few easy steps, making journey planning for special Christmas events effortlessly smooth.

In celebration of the Christmas season, the National Trust is opening up its historic houses for a host of traditional festive events, shopping and lunches, including:

Find out more about the perfect places to savour the Christmas build-up and to revive your Christmas spirit, as well as how to get there quickly, by visiting www.nationaltrust.org.uk! You can go straight to the events listing by clicking on www.nationaltrust.org.uk/events.

Visitors to www.nationaltrust.org.uk select the ‘Visits & holidays’ link on the homepage, and choose an area of interest on the UK map that then appears. This brings up top-line information about sites of interest in the selected area..From these pages, the sites found and named have hyperlinks that link the visitor to further information, including a tab named ‘Getting there’. Visitors click on this link, followed by the ‘Map’ link, to view Multimap’s easy-to-read street-level maps of the area, with zoom in/out functionality.

Commenting on the new site enhancement, Zoe Trinder-Widdess, Internet Manager, the National Trust, said, “A key part of our online strategy is to exploit the internet as a medium to encourage more people to visit National Trust sites, in a bid to increase membership. The provision of clear maps that are easy-to-access is an important contribution to this strategy and we are pleased to say that Multimap’s maps have already proved popular with online visitors.”

Steve Frost, Multimap’s Head of Sales for Europe, said, “We are delighted that our In-line service has been selected by The National Trust. Accurate online location information has certainly become a must-have for an increasingly demanding public. Our visually-appealing mapping services provide our customers with a cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution to meet the growing demands of their customers.”

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About Multimap

Multimap is one of the world’s leading providers of mapping and location-based services. The company delivers more online maps, point-to-point driving directions and geo-spatial ("where's my nearest?") searches to more companies than any other supplier in Europe. All services are offered on mobile, PDA, kiosk, and interactive TV platforms and in multiple languages.

The public website, www.multimap.com, provides a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life. Key features include street-level maps of Europe, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; links to location information; and services such as hotel, restaurant and entertainment booking. The public site attracts over 10 million unique users, registers more than 160 million page impressions every month, and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the UK. Multimap recently featured in The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 league table of fastest-growing unquoted UK companies across all sectors.

About the National Trust

The National Trust is a charity and is completely independent of Government. We rely for income on membership fees, donations and legacies, and revenue raised from our commercial operations.

We now have 3.4 million members and 43,000 volunteers. More than 12 million people visited our pay for entry properties in 2004, while an estimated 50 million visited our open air properties.

We protect and open to the public over 300 historic houses and gardens and 49 industrial monuments and mills.

But it doesn’t stop there. We also look after forests, woods, fens, beaches, farmland, downs, moorland, islands, archaeological remains, castles, nature reserves, villages - for ever, for everyone.