Wanderlog Alternative: What Happens to Your Trip After You Come Home?

Name five restaurants you ate in last year. Not the good ones — any five, with the city attached.

Most people who have travelled seriously cannot do it. They can tell you the country count to the digit. They can find the photos in about four minutes of scrolling. What they cannot produce is the thing underneath: where they actually were, what it actually cost, and in what order it all happened.

This is not a memory problem. It is a tooling problem, and it has a specific cause. Almost every travel app ever built is a planner, and a planner is designed to forget.

Planners are amnesiac by design, and that is correct

A trip planner's job ends at the airport. Wanderlog is the archetype and it is very good at that job: you build the itinerary, you pin the places, you argue with your friends in the comments, you land. From that moment the document is dead weight. It described a future that has now happened, and nothing in it was built to record what happened instead.

That is not a flaw. Nobody wants their itinerary asking follow-up questions on day nine of a holiday. The problem is that the planner is the only tool most travellers ever install, so the planner's blind spot becomes theirs. Ten years of travel goes in the front, and what comes out the other end is a folder of stale itineraries and a number you quote at dinner parties.

So the honest framing of "which app should I use" is not a feature comparison. It is a question about which half of the problem you are trying to solve. Before the trip, you want a plan. After it, you want a record. These are different products and pretending one is the other is why people end up with neither.

What a record actually contains

A plan is a list of intentions. A record is a set of facts that accumulate, and the value is entirely in the accumulation — one entry is worthless, eleven years of entries is the only copy of something that exists nowhere else.

MapMyWorld is built for that second half and nothing else. Concretely:

• A world map coloured by countries visited, against a reference set of 199
• Places logged with photos, dates and coordinates
• Airports, against a database of more than 10,000 by ICAO and IATA code
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites, against all 1,250 inscribed
• Expenses per trip that roll up across every trip, in 27 categories, split card versus cash and converted to your home currency
• 33 achievements, friend connections, and a public profile for people who want a page to point at

Trips exist too — with dates, places and a PDF export — and they move from planned to ongoing to completed automatically by date. But a trip here is a container inside a history, not the top-level object. Delete the trip and the countries, airports and sites you recorded remain, because they happened.

The unit is you, not the holiday. That single decision is what makes the numbers answerable: not "what did this trip cost" but "what does Japan cost me, across four visits, compared to Portugal".

Everything is typed in by hand

There is no background location capture. Nothing follows you around. If you were in Hanoi and you do not enter Hanoi, MapMyWorld does not know you were in Hanoi.

Plenty of people will read that as a missing feature. It is a deliberate one. Continuous location history is a category of data that is trivial to collect, permanently uncomfortable to hold, and impossible to un-collect once a company has it. We would rather ask you to type. The five minutes after a trip is a small tax for a history that contains only what you chose to put in it. We go into that trade-off properly in our comparison of travel history apps.

The ingredients, printed on the front

Here is the part most comparison articles bury, so we will put it first.

The free tier is deliberately small, and one of its limits is unusually harsh. Free accounts get 5 places, 10 countries, 1 trip, 10 airports and 1 friend connection. The place allowance is a lifetime one, not a live count: delete a place and the slot does not come back.

That rule exists for an unglamorous reason. Every place added costs us money at a paid mapping API, and an add-delete-re-add loop was billing us repeatedly for the same user's indecision. We closed it. The side effect is that a Free account is a demonstration of the idea, not somewhere to live, and we would rather say that in the second paragraph than let you discover it at place six.

The paid plans are $7.99 a month, $59.99 a year, or $199.99 once. The lifetime option is not a gimmick. A record you intend to keep for twenty years sits badly with a subscription you might cancel in three, and we would rather take the money once than watch a decade of someone's history go dark over a lapsed card.

Things we do not have. No group collaboration. No inbox scanning that assembles bookings for you. No offline maps. No route optimisation. No native app in either store — MapMyWorld is an installable web app, which updates instantly and works well, and is still not the same thing as an icon you got from Apple. Bulk export as CSV and JSON is Pro-only, as are per-trip tasks and notes.

And the one that will actually annoy the people we most want: there is no CSV import yet. If you have fifteen years of history sitting in a spreadsheet, you are currently typing it in. That is the single largest gap in this product and we are not going to dress it up.

If you only ever need Tuesday

Some people genuinely do not want any of this.

If the only question you ever ask a travel app is "what am I doing on Tuesday in Lisbon", a planner answers it and a record does not. Group trips, in particular, live or die on real-time collaboration, and that is planner territory by definition. Nobody needs a permanent archive to survive a long weekend.

We are not going to tell you a planner is a bad product or list the ways ours is better. It is a different tool for a different half of the trip. Plenty of people run a planner before departure and a record afterwards, which takes about ten minutes per trip and is the only version of this that still works in a decade.

What we will say is that a planner will never grow into a record by accident. The data it collects is the wrong shape and it discards it on purpose. If you are waiting for your itinerary app to eventually become your travel history, you are going to wait a long time, and the years in between are the ones you are losing.

The test

Ask what you want to be able to answer three years from now.

If it is "where am I staying next Thursday", you want a planner. Use one. If it is "which UNESCO sites have I actually stood inside", "how much has Japan cost me across four visits", or "which airports have I transited since 2019", nothing built to plan a trip will ever tell you, because it was never built to remember.

That is the whole distinction. Everything else is feature lists.

Two of our other pieces sit either side of this one: a direct comparison with Polarsteps for people who want a visual journal rather than a database, and what to do now Trail Wallet is discontinued for people whose expense history got stranded mid-record.

Start where you are. The record only gets more valuable, and it only ever starts today.