wikistay: a travel platform where the map is the interface, not a feature buried in a menu

The problem: travel planning is scattered across five apps

Planning a trip today usually means one app for a place to stay, another for restaurants, another for tours, another for reviews — with no single view of how those things sit relative to each other, physically, along a journey.

wikistay (Wander Violet #7C3AED + rose, independent brand) starts from a different premise: the map itself is the product, not a secondary tab.

What’s actually built

wikistay’s map runs on MapLibre GL, not a paid Google Maps key — tiles come from OpenFreeMap (free, no API key), with a genuine 2D/3D toggle (fill-extrusion buildings in 3D mode). That’s a deliberate architecture decision: the point-of-interest data is BIXSO’s own Firestore layer, not a rented index, which is the actual defensibility here rather than the map rendering itself.

Five service layers organise the map — Stay, Eat, Rest, Tour, Health — with category-chip filtering, search and place cards, seeded with 30 real Melbourne locations for the first live release. Auth runs through Google sign-in with a role split between traveler and business accounts.

What makes it different from a review app

The feature we think matters most isn’t built yet, and we’re saying so plainly: business connect — bundling multiple businesses along a single journey into one connected offer (a hotel, a nearby tour operator and a restaurant, coordinated rather than discovered separately). That’s Phase 2. What’s live today is the map core and the data model it’ll run on.

The architecture, honestly

Firestore rules are default-deny (RLS-first, with places public-read), AI runs only through the BIXSO Brain Gateway, and — like auslandscape — Cloud Run isn’t enabled yet because there’s no backend deployed, so the current cost is genuinely $0, not a tuned-down configuration.

Where it stands

Live at wikistay.com — map, filters, search and 30 seeded Melbourne places, verified end-to-end in a live browser. Journey planner and business connect are next.

Book a consult if your business would benefit from being discovered as part of a journey, not just a standalone listing.