A few weeks ago, a customer came to us with a feature request we weren't expecting: integrate what3words into ViaLoop Fleet.
It's the kind of ask that, if you've never heard of what3words, sounds like a gimmick — and if you've used it, you immediately get why it matters.
I'll admit I came in biased. I've been a what3words user personally for years; so has more than one person on our team. But what tipped this from "interesting feature" to "shipping next sprint" was a single sentence the customer said in a meeting:
That sentence is the whole pitch. Read on if you want the longer version.
What is what3words?
If you haven't come across it: what3words has divided the entire surface of the planet into 3-metre × 3-metre squares and given each one a unique address made of three words. Every square has its own address — for example ///filled.count.soap or ///daring.lion.race — drawn from a curated word list designed to avoid sound-alikes and offensive collisions.
Three things make it work:
- It's globally consistent. Every 3-metre square on Earth — desert, ocean, parking lot, mountainside — has a stable address, generated deterministically. No central database lookup is required to know what address corresponds to a given coordinate.
- It's precise. 3 m × 3 m. You can stand at a specific corner of a building and the what3words address tells you which corner.
- It's communicable. Three words are easier to dictate over a noisy radio, a poor mobile line, or to a stressed driver than fourteen digits of latitude and longitude.
Australia is years ahead
If you've called any emergency service in Australia in the last few years — police, ambulance, fire — there's a good chance the operator asked you for your what3words address. Australia has integrated what3words across virtually every emergency service line. It isn't novel there; it's routine.
That's the level of operational maturity I'd like to see for what3words globally. India and the GCC aren't there yet. But the underlying problems what3words solves are universal — and so is the value, once it's wired in.
Where ordinary addresses break down
what3words isn't especially useful in urban navigation — Google Maps does that fine. It earns its keep in the places where addresses fail. A few categories we run into constantly with our fleet customers:
- Large industrial sites. A petrochemical complex spans kilometres. Saying "the loading bay" isn't enough; saying "the third loading bay near the western fence" gets the wrong driver to the wrong gate. Three words land within a 3-metre square of the right one.
- Container yards and ports. A container ID and a yard reference number don't actually help a driver find the stack. A what3words address does.
- Construction sites, mines, agriculture. Anywhere with a single street address but a footprint measured in square kilometres.
- Event venues, parking lots, exhibition grounds. "Lot 4, level B" works until everyone parks somewhere else.
- Accidents and breakdowns at the roadside. The original use case. "Near the third bridge after Exit 12" is unhelpful at 2am with a broken-down truck. Three words are unambiguous.
Indian and GCC fleets, in particular, run jobs across exactly this kind of address-thin terrain — farm-to-market logistics, port-to-warehouse, event logistics in venues that have no street address at all, last-mile delivery in neighbourhoods where the same nominal address can be three different houses.
What we built into ViaLoop Fleet
The integration itself isn't dramatic — and that's the point. Where ViaLoop Fleet users previously saw a vehicle pinned to a lat/lon coordinate, they now see both: lat/lon for engineering use, and the what3words address for human use. A few specific surfaces:
- Live tracking. Every active vehicle's current position now displays its what3words address alongside coordinates. Dispatchers can read it out over the phone if a driver needs guidance toward a specific spot.
- Geofencing. The geofence creation tool now accepts what3words addresses as input. Define a precise pickup point inside a 200-acre yard with three words instead of having to draw a polygon by hand.
- Pickup and delivery confirmation. Drivers can verify drop-off against the consignee's what3words address. The lat/lon may match, the gate name may not — three words eliminate the ambiguity.
- Alerts. When an alert fires — geofence breach, accident, prolonged idle — the alert message now includes the what3words address so the responding party knows exactly where to go without parsing coordinates on a phone.
It's a small layer. But it's the kind of layer that fleet ops people have asked us for in five different ways before — they just didn't always know what3words was the answer.
A small note of admiration
I've worked with a fair number of mapping and geocoding APIs over the years. what3words is one of the few where the simplicity of the idea is matched by the discipline of the execution. The grid is fixed, the algorithm is deterministic, the SDK is sensible, the localisation across languages is non-trivial and they've done it well. That's harder than it sounds.
Integrating what3words into ViaLoop Fleet was a small engineering lift. The value to our customers — especially those operating in geographies where address infrastructure is patchy — is several times larger than the cost.
If you run a fleet that touches large properties, ports, yards, or any kind of terrain where a regular address is more guess than guidance, this one's for you.
what3words is a registered service of what3words.com. Their work has been quietly excellent for over a decade. The integration described here is in production in ViaLoop Fleet; if you want to see how it surfaces in our dashboard, the demo link at the top goes straight to a 30-minute walkthrough with our team.