Field card · Gander (YQX) and Deer Lake (YDF)

Twenty seconds at the door

The open map records no car rental counter at Gander and none at Deer Lake. The counters are plainly there. No map app, no travel app and no assistant can see them — which is a strange thing to be true of two of the three airports this site measures its drives from.

What the map holds inside each arrivals hall

The same question, asked of all three terminal buildings on the same day.

St. John's (16 things): 3 cash machines, a bar, 2 cafés, a takeaway, a pub, a restaurant, 3 washrooms, a playground, a convenience shop, a gift shop, a newsagent.
Gander (0): Nothing at all. The building is mapped and named “Terminal”, and there is not one amenity of any kind inside it.
Deer Lake (0): Nothing at all — and the building carries no name, which is a one-field fix worth thirty seconds while you are standing in it.

So you will be adding, not confirming. Island-wide the map holds 11 car rentals (7 pins and 4 drawn areas); 9 of them are around St. John's, and the nearest one to Gander is 98.3 km away.

Before you go — two minutes, once

A free OpenStreetMap account — an email address, at openstreetmap.org. It is the account that puts your name on the work.
Every Door, free, from every-door.app (iPhone, Android, F-Droid). It has the categories built in, so you never see a tag or anything resembling code.

In the arrivals hall

1. Stand at the counter. One counter at a time. If four companies share one desk with four signs, that is four entries, not one.
2. Tap + and choose "Car Rental." That one tap is the entire technical part.
3. Type the name exactly as the sign spells it. Not what you know the company is called — what is printed above the desk. "Enterprise Rent-A-Car" if that is what it says; "Avis / Budget" if one sign carries both and they share the desk.
4. Drag the pin onto the counter, inside the terminal building, not onto the car park.
5. Save. It uploads when you have signal. Repeat for the next sign.

Photograph the sign

A photograph of the sign is your survey record — it is what you saw, from where you stood. One photo per counter and you can finish the entries sitting down. Worth catching while you are there: the name exactly as spelled, whether the desk is staffed or just a phone and a board, any phone number printed on the counter itself, and anything a traveller would need and could not guess.

Leave these blank

Opening hours — unless you are reading them off the counter right now. A wrong closing time sends somebody to a dark desk, which is worse than telling them nothing.
Anything from the airport's website. If the sign is not there, the entry is not there.
Descriptions and opinions. The map takes facts.

If a counter is already mapped

Confirm it anyway — Every Door has a “yes, this still exists” button, and it stamps today's date on a place nobody has laid eyes on in years. Half of what is wrong with a rural map is not missing places; it is places that closed years ago and nobody said so.

What it changes

Every app built on the open map can then see that you can rent a car at Gander and at Deer Lake — phones, car systems, travel apps, and this site. It is the same data underneath all of them, which is why doing it once fixes it everywhere rather than in one place. And it belongs to nobody: not to us, and not to whoever asked you.

Measured from the province's own OpenStreetMap data. Inside each terminal polygon — way/154350645 at Gander, way/180061286 at Deer Lake — and island-wide for the rental counts. The rest of the mapping asks are on Put your town on the map.