About
A travel assistant that lives on one map.
Most people end a trip with a camera roll and a vague number. The places they stood in front of are somewhere in there, unlabelled, and the count of countries lives only in their head. GetMap exists to make that a record instead of a memory, one you can see, add to, and check.
It is a web app and an iPhone app on the same catalogue. Nothing to install to try it, no account to look around, and no card until you hit a limit you actually mind.
What it is
Four things, one map
They share a map on purpose. The globe you count countries on is the same one that hands out quests and turns into a plan.
A map you colour in
Tap a country to mark it visited, or put it on the wishlist with your trip dates. The panel keeps the count and your share of the world: 195 countries to fill in, and a number that means something because of the next part.
Quests you can prove
A quest sits on a real place. You go, take a photo and upload it; your browser reads the photo’s own geotag and measures the distance to the quest point. Inside 200 m it counts. Photos with no location data cannot be verified, and we say so rather than counting them anyway. The catalogue holds 222 quests across 145 cities in seven categories.
Audioguides on demand
Pan the map and the real places around it appear, each with its Google rating. Press play and the narration is written and voiced for that place when you ask for it, which is why somewhere nobody has opened before takes a few seconds the first time. English for now.
A plan you can walk
Name a city, a number of days and a budget, and get days back: stops in an order that makes walking sense, each leg routed on real streets with a real time and distance. Flights and hotels sit beside the route rather than in another tab.
How it is made
Where the facts come from
Everything a visitor is shown has a source, and the ones that matter are not us.
Places, ratings and review counts come from Google. Walking legs are routed through the Google Routes API on real streets, and when routing is unavailable for a leg, the day is labelled estimated rather than given a plausible-looking number. That single label is the reason to trust the rest of them.
The quest catalogue is built the same way. A candidate place is checked against Google (does it exist, is it open, how is it rated) before it becomes a quest, rather than being taken from a model’s memory. Narration is generated per place on request, which is a deliberate trade: slower the first time, and current rather than written once in 2023.
Check-ins are measured on your device. The photo’s geotag never has to leave it for the distance to be computed, and a check-in that fails is reported as failed.
Being straight about it
What GetMap does not do
Shorter than the list above, and more useful if you are deciding whether to bother.
No offline maps. Not now and not planned. If your requirement is a map that works with the aeroplane mode on, this is the wrong tool and we would rather you found that out here than after a download.
It does not replace Google Maps. It plans the days; Google Maps navigates the last two hundred metres, and every stop opens there in one tap. There is a page about exactly that.
One language. The web app and the audioguides are English. More is a question of demand, not of principle.
Who to write to
Reaching a person
GetMap is a small, independent product rather than a department of a large company, which mostly means that the person who reads your email is the person who can change the thing you are writing about. Support, partnership and bug reports all go to [email protected].
The operating entity, its registered address and the terms you are agreeing to are set out in the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.