MapQuest Announces Deal with CEC Entertainment to Drive More Traffic to Its Family Restaurants
Millions of Birthday Party Guests Can Easily Find Chuck E. Cheese's Restaurants
DENVER, CO, March 8, 2004
MapQuest, the world's leading online mapping, routing, and global location services company and wholly owned subsidiary of America Online, Inc., today announced that CEC Entertainment has selected MapQuest Business Solutions as its mapping provider for the Restaurant Locator of Chuck E. Cheese's family restaurants. CEC Entertainment has licensed MapQuest's InterConnect Service to provide a powerful proximity-search function so Web site visitors can quickly and easily display restaurant locations at ChuckECheese.com.
Chuck E. Cheese's Restaurants host more than 2 million birthday parties each year at its 404 Chuck E Cheese corporate-owned and 51 franchise restaurants worldwide. Chuck E. Cheese's places significant emphasis on the timeliness and quality of data for restaurant locations, and the geographic content available from MapQuest. With a high-quality locator and a series of tools to deploy and manage their MapQuest solution, Chuck E. Cheese's Web site visitors can now conduct one-step searches that display and list the closest restaurants from their points of origin with a degree of accuracy unobtainable from their previous technology provider.
The MapQuest Restaurant Locator service is utilized by many well respected brands in the industry: Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Chili's, Einstein Bagels, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. The Restaurant Locator is an integral part of business strategy to drive traffic from the Web site to the restaurants and increase revenues.
"We know that finding restaurant locations is very important to our customers because the mapping function is the third most trafficked part of our Web site," said Jon Rice, Vice President of Marketing for CEC Entertainment. "We made the decision to switch our mapping technology to MapQuest because of the quality of detail in the street-level maps."
"CEC Entertainment provides a unique restaurant concept that has significantly grown year after year," said Tommy McGloin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of MapQuest Business Solutions."Now that CEC is using the MapQuest mapping services, their customers will easily be able to find a nearby restaurant for a birthday party or for a fun family night out."
About CEC Entertainment
CEC Entertainment, Inc., headquartered in Irving, Texas, was originally incorporated under the name Showbiz Pizza Place, Inc. and began trading on NASDAQ in 1989. In 1998, the company changed its name to CEC Entertainment, Inc. and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange using a new ticker symbol (CEC).
CEC Entertainment, Inc. operates a system of 468 Chuck E. Cheese's restaurants in 48 states, of which 420 are owned and operated by the Company.
About MapQuest
MapQuest helps people find places. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado and Mountville, Pennsylvania, MapQuest offers Web, Wireless, Business Solutions, and Published products worldwide. MapQuest.com, both the top mapping and directories site on the Web according to comScore Media Metrix, served 38 million users in February 2005. MapQuest also empowers more than 1,400 businesses with software solutions to location-enable Web and wireless applications, and is a leading provider of custom mapping content for publishers and corporations, producing more than 1.5 billion pages of printed maps every year. MapQuest.com Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of America Online, Inc.