If you’ve noticed a slight lull in the cadence of Map Happenings posts it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s because I’ve been preoccupied with other matters — and one in particular: a grand tour of Great Britain, encompassing a few of the most iconic locations in England, Scotland and Wales.

This was a three week road trip with a different stop practically every night.

The process of planning the trip proved to be long and arduous, but actually a lot of fun. It involved tons of research into places to visit, the best places to stay and eat and the best routes to get from A to B. The tools and information sources I used were varied and while they enabled me to build a plan, it wasn’t particularly straightforward. But I got there in the end.

Now that I’m back I’d like to share the memories of the trip. However, like the trip planning, building and sharing a coherent résumé of my journey is far from straightforward — actually in many ways it sucks.

Net/net: nobody has cracked the trip planning nut and nobody has cracked the trip memories nut.

So if you’re a passionate mapping nerd with some developer chops here’s your challenge and opportunity: build a seriously magical product for travel that becomes the go-to default for planning, organizing and reliving a trip.

I’ll recount my experience below so you can use it as one set of data points. Take your own experiences as another set of data points. Talk to your family and friends about how they’ve planned trips and shared memories. Then be ruthless and question every requirement. Boil everything down to the very essence of what people actually need. And be sure to weave in design wizardry from the get-go to make the product insanely easy and a delight to use.

I’ll bet you a dollar: you’ll have a winner on your hands.

Let’s Start with The Planning

Where do you start? In my case I had some ideas and some parameters. There were certain places I knew I wanted to visit and a few places I knew I wanted to stay. The trip was time bound to three weeks and I knew I didn’t want to spend all day driving in a car. So the goal was fun and easy.

If you do some poking around you will discover there are some apps out there that attempt to help you build a trip plan. But they’re all pretty laborious to use.

The closest I could find to a reasonably good trip planner was Wanderlog. It’s pretty comprehensive and allows you to build an itinerary, make notes, set budgets and collaborate with others. It’s also got pretty good place search and a nice ‘mappy’ interface. And of course like any of today’s products from search engines to bananas — it’s AI enabled:

But remember, yours truly is a Jaded Mapping Curmudgeon (JMC), so would I use such a new fangled tool? Well I did try. But I was immediately faced with the uncertainty. If I were to spend copious hours investing in this tool would it give me the results I need? And would I be able to use it easily on the trip? And could I (with short arms and deep pockets) get what I wanted without having to fork out $$$ for the pro version? And, as an Apple Maps bigot, would I be forced to use Google Maps?

FUD quickly consumed me. I demurred.

So what did I use? Well it boiled down to two tools with which I had extreme familiarity: Apple Maps and a spreadsheet — in my case Numbers. Let me explain the process:

Similar to Google Maps, it turns out Apple Maps has an extremely useful feature to build lists of places and add to them to collections. In Apple Maps’ case they call them ‘Guides’. Apple Maps Guides come in two forms: curated guides and then ‘My Guides’. Curated guides are lists of places put together by well know publications and there are now hundreds and hundreds of them in Apple Maps. Here’s a sample for London:

But Maps also provides an easy way to create your own guides on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. Simply take a place of interest, tap the “… More” button and select “Add to Guides”. Bingo. Now you can quickly build a list of places that are relevant to your trip and add or delete items from the guide with a couple of taps:

Here’s a view of the guide I created for my UK trip, complete with hotels, places I wanted to visit, attractions and even laundries:

What was beautiful about this approach is everything I needed was immediately accessible: phone numbers, web sites, directions and by viewing the guide and zooming into a particular area I could quickly filter the list to what was relevant for a particular day. And with one tap you can share the guide with others.

What was missing of course was all the details: arrival and departure dates, reservation numbers, booking references, costs & budgeting. Now I could have spent the energy and put all that information in the Wanderlog app, but like I said, I was wary of trusting the information to an unfamiliar app. I also found it was difficult to get the app to summarize the information in the form I was looking for. So naturally what do I do? I turn to a spreadsheet. Here’s the one I created and it provided everything I needed right at my fingertips:

Because it was cloud based it was easily accessible from any of my devices and, using the collaboration features of Numbers, easy to share and edit with others.

But how did I figure out where to stop, stay and eat? That, dear reader, is where the research started in earnest. If you’ve read any of my past posts, in particular ‘Why Rating Systems for Places & POIs Suck… and a Possible Fix‘ you’ll realize I’m not a fan of crowdsourced ratings — the main reason being that the Venn diagram of my tastes and opinions seldom overlaps with the tastes and opinions of the general masses. Also many — if not all — place ratings tend to be dominated by the opinions of septics. No offense, but when you hear stories about such people complaining vociferously about the lack of French toast in Parisian bistros it quickly makes you realize that perhaps you should take their opinions with a grain of salt.

So my research relied mostly on well respected travel publications. If you’re ever searching for places to stay in the UK I can highly recommend perusing The [London] Telegraph travel web pages. I would strongly advise you stay clear of any web site driven primarily by booking revenue and stay clear of highly popular sites (particularly US based) that claim to provide ‘travel advice’. Look for the smaller, quirkier publications. Or go by word of mouth from friends and family. I think you get the picture.

Pretty soon you’ll be building up a nice personal guide in your favorite mapping product. With a companion spreadsheet you’ll have what you need.

You could say that all this laborious research is part of the fun — like looking for a brilliant sale on that item you’ve always cherished. A relentless search for the perfect place provides not only the reward but also the endorphin. So, if someone made it too easy would you feel like you were making the right decisions? You be the judge.

On The Journey

The Apple Maps guide I created for the trip worked like a charm. I immediately had all the pertinent information I needed at my fingertips. And when traveling to the next destination the ‘avoid highways’ option gave me a reasonably good and lesser traveled route that was more interesting to drive.

But it did uncover my three big wishes for Apple Maps:

• Tweaks to my guide in Apple Maps didn’t promulgate to the people I shared it with. So sharing a guide is really a ‘send a copy’ feature, not a ‘collaborate’ feature. Apple has both options for Notes, Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents. I wish they’d bring the same to Apple Maps Guides.
• I would have loved a ‘Scenic Route’ option for directions.
• If there was one area I was longing for some ‘Apple Intelligence’ it was for suggesting places to stop along the route — perhaps for some good coffee or a site worth visiting. There were at least two occasions when we drove right past a spectacular site that we didn’t know we were going to pass.

Here they are:

Angel of the North

The Angel of the North is a contemporary sculpture by Antony Gormley, located just south of Newcastle, England. Completed in 1998, it is believed to be the largest sculpture of an angel in the world. It stands 20 metres (66 ft) tall with a wingspan of 54 metres (177 ft), larger than that of a Boeing 757 aircraft.

The Kelpies

The Kelpies are a pair of monumental steel horse-heads near the Scottish town of Falkirk. They were designed by sculptor Andy Scott and were completed in 2013. A kelpie, or water kelpie, is a shape-shifting spirit inhabiting lochs in Irish and Scottish folklore. It is usually described as a horse-like creature and is able to adopt human form.

Sharing the Memories

Facebucket? Instagam? X? TikTok? MySpace? You won’t catch this JMC in that festering world. Me: I want to share different sets of photos with different sets of people — and not with the whole world thanks very much.

So along the journey I resorted to Messages, WhatsApp and an ancient appy thing Gen Z users have never heard of: “electronic-mail”. Painful? Yes. But at least I was in full control of distribution.

The trouble really started when I got back home. I had taken nearly 700 photos and they were widely geographically distributed. Furthermore, if I shared a set of pictures of a particular location, say Sterling Castle, the people I shared it with weren’t necessarily, shall we say, ‘geographically capable’. So they had no idea of place or context.

Finding all the photos of a particular location is fairly easy to do in Photos on iOS or macOS: use the ‘Places’ tab and zoom into the map location of interest. You can then subselect and share the set of photos from there.

If you want to get cute: open iMovie on your iPhone, select “Start New Project” and then select ‘Magic Movie’:

It’s actually pretty awesome. Here’s a Magic Movie I created for Sterling Castle in Scotland:

But again — what’s missing from all this?

Err … how about a map boys and gals?

It turns out there is no magic way to include a map. One app I tried with supposedly good ratings, Tripcast, provides a map view option on uploaded photos, but it is up to the user to select the map and there is [AFAIK] no way to recreate the journey with map animations. Also, it takes ages to upload any photos to their servers. I tried uploading all the photos I took on the trip and the app repeatedly crashed. Ugh.

Now some of you Apple fanpeople may have watched the recent WWDC24 Keynote and noticed a new feature coming to the Photos app called ‘Trips’. Here’s the clip about the new Photos app coming in iOS 18:

But does the ‘Trips’ filter include a map? Alas, I don’t think so.

And more importantly: does the ‘Trips’ feature include map animations? I seriously doubt it. If you want to recreate a journey with map animations and share it with others it’s hard. Seriously hard. You can try using StoryMaps¹ (sorry: it’s hard and painful). If you’re a pro you can use an Adobe After Effects template like WorldTravelMaps (even harder and even more painful):

Another possible app you might want try for sharing memories is called Polarsteps. From what I can tell, Polarsteps seems to be a Facebook for trips, so you can go there to search and browse for trips other people have taken and you can use it to create a résumé of trips you may have taken yourself. It seems mountains better than Tripcast in that it will (somewhat scarily) scan your photo library and automatically build trips from that. I downloaded Polarsteps from the app store and after about 10 minutes of scanning and about another 20 minutes of poking I was able to build a rudimentary version of my GB Grand Tour:

Polarsteps was about 70% successful in rebuilding the trip. However, it did hallucinate a bit when trying to associate photos with location. But, all-in-all, not too bad.

I see Clare Jones, formerly of What3Words, is now CEO of Polartrips. I can’t wait to see what she does.

A Possible Magical Product

So what’s the perfect app?

An app that helps me plan and collaborate effortlessly. Totally map centric. And super smart. 

• Automatically add details to my itinerary by mining my emails about bookings and reservations
• Make suggestions based on places I like and other people like me like (not just the general masses)
• Leverages the apps I use every day: Maps, Photos and Calendar
• Suggests more interesting routes especially scenic routes

And importantly: similar to what Polarsteps attempts to do: it auto-magically allows me to recreate the journey so I can relive it when I get home: a journey with gorgeous map animations and smart clustering of the photos and videos I took along the way.

Apple Maps and Photos (or Google equivalents) sort of come close to solving some of the challenges. Wanderlog makes a valiant try but is still laborious and totally misses on memories. Polarsteps goes a long way to reliving a trip but lacks the capabilities of trip planing.

So what’s a possible future?

Perhaps, just perhaps: some more mischievous sherlocking by that nefarious fruity company in Cupertino. I can see it now:

Trips: your magical companion for any journey.

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Footnotes

1. Secretly published by the Environmental Systems Research Institute I believe ↩︎

Acknowledgements

• Apple
• Esri
• Polarsteps
• Tripcast
• Visit Scotland
• Wanderlog
• Wikimedia
• WorldTravelMaps