SwipeSights 2.0: Passport Stamps, Travel Memories, and a Bigger Social Layer

SwipeSights 2.0 is the biggest update we have ever shipped, and it changes what the app is for. SwipeSights began as a group trip planner that turns swiping into a finished itinerary, and it still does exactly that. What 2.0 adds is everything that happens around the plan.

Your trips now leave a trail. You collect passport stamps, save memories, watch your travels fill in a world map, and share the whole journey with friends. We rebuilt large parts of the app for this release, guided almost entirely by what early users asked for. Here is a tour of what is new.

What is SwipeSights?

SwipeSights is a group trip planner for iPhone. You pick a city, swipe through real attractions to vote on what to see, and SwipeSights turns those votes into a day-by-day itinerary with an efficient walking route. It works for groups and for solo travelers, in any city in the world. The app is free to start, with a one-time upgrade per trip for longer plans and larger groups.

Your travel passport, and the memories that fill it

The feature people have fallen for hardest in 2.0 is the passport. Every place you visit earns a collectible stamp, and those stamps live in your own travel passport inside the app. It turns the simple act of traveling into something you can collect and look back on.

Alongside the passport are memories. Your trip photos are saved in the style of vintage postage stamps, each one a small keepsake from a place you have been. That postage-stamp treatment has been one of the most-loved additions of the entire release, and the response from early users has been genuinely lovely.

Left: your travel passport of collected stamps. Right: trip photos saved as vintage postage-stamp memories.

Social grew up

SwipeSights has always been a group trip planner, so in 2.0 we made the social side a first-class part of the app rather than a feature bolted on the edge. You add friends by username, set a profile picture, and build a profile that shows where you have been, complete with travel stats and badges.

The centerpiece is a new activity feed. You see your friends' trips and stamps as they happen, and you can react to show them how you feel about where they have been. For an app that is fundamentally about traveling together, giving the social layer real room to breathe was overdue, and it makes the whole experience feel alive between trips.

The new activity feed: follow your friends' travels and react to their stamps.

An Explore map you can actually play with

Every place you log now appears on an interactive Explore map, a personal world map that fills in as you travel. You can pan, zoom, and tap your way around everywhere you have been, then open any spot to revisit the trip behind it.

This one surprised us. The feedback on the Explore map has been wonderful, with users telling us it is the first time their travel history has felt like something they own rather than a list buried in a folder.

The interactive Explore map fills in with every place you visit.

The engine underneath

Under all of this sits the part we are quietly proudest of. SwipeSights runs on what we believe is the most advanced routing engine ever built specifically for tourist trips. It is not a generic directions tool. It is purpose-built for the messy reality of sightseeing: dozens of stops, fixed opening hours, closed days, clustering, walking fatigue, and meal timing.

The engine takes the places your group voted for and arranges them into an efficient day-by-day route. It groups nearby attractions on the same day, uses real walking distances, checks opening hours and closed days so you never arrive at a locked door, and slots restaurant suggestions in at natural meal breaks. In 2.0 we made it even better, with sharper clustering and smarter handling of timing across a multi-day trip.

The routing engine arranges each day into one efficient, opening-hours-aware route.

Rebuilt around how you actually use it

We also gave the app a full UI and UX overhaul, and almost every change came straight from user feedback. The dashboard and the itinerary pages were redesigned from the ground up, navigation was simplified, and countless small rough edges were smoothed out.

The result is the most user-friendly version of SwipeSights we have ever shipped. Things that used to take a few taps now take one, the whole app feels lighter and clearer, and we fixed a long list of bugs along the way.

A redesigned dashboard and a cleaner planning flow, shaped by user feedback.

This is just the start

As big as 2.0 is, we are treating it as a foundation rather than a finish line. We are already deep into what comes next, and there are several exciting updates on the way. Stay tuned.

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