Travellog
Track every country, city, flight and airport you've visited
Hello! I’m a medical student from South Korea who loves traveling more than anything. I’ve been traveling abroad almost every month since 2024 and just got back from a trip to Mongolia. I want to share my story of exploring the world and building an app based on those experiences.
In 2024, I decided to take a gap year from school. I wondered what I couldn't do as a busy med student, and the first thing that came to mind was traveling. While I had been to Japan, China, the US, and parts of Europe before, those trips felt more like family affairs than true explorations of the world.
On my first solo trip, I wanted to see as many countries as possible, which resulted in visiting 10 countries in just 20 days. It might sound crazy to visit Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Austria in a single trip, but that variety is what made it better. Within a week, I went from experiencing my first mosque and wandering the deserts of Petra to admiring the Hofburg Palace.
My second long trip was even more intense. I visited 18 countries in a single month, ranging from China to Luxembourg, the Faroe Islands (which none of my friends had even heard of), Russia (despite the conflict), and the Baltic states.
I learned two things from these journeys. First, once I reached the 30-country mark, traveling felt more like a "mission" or a "game" than just a relaxing vacation. I started counting the stamps in my passport and took pride in the number of countries I had visited. Second, I realized there is more to traveling than just "counting countries." Visiting a city like London, exploring the Hermitage Museum, or even flying with a new airline for the first time was a unique experience in itself.
I started looking for apps to record my travels and tried every app available on Google Play. However, most were limited to simply counting countries and pinning them on a map. Some offered a bit more, like tracking airports or major landmarks, but they were still too basic for a "heavy traveler." For instance, I wanted to know the combined population of the countries I’d visited or the percentage of Muslim-majority countries I’d explored, but such data was nowhere to be found. That’s when I decided to build my own app.
Using AI, creating a "visited countries map" was much easier than I expected, even for someone with no prior coding experience. I also found many free online databases for cities with over 15,000 people or global airport lists. The first real challenge was integrating these disparate databases. While AI was great at generating individual blocks of code, it struggled to maintain context across different features, leading to errors when multiple databases were involved. For example, connecting "CDG Airport," "Paris," "France," and the "Eiffel Tower" into a cohesive system was difficult.
Furthermore, I had to build my own databases when I couldn't find existing ones. While AI could easily generate data for the "Big Ben" or "Taj Mahal," the information became less accurate for less famous locations. I ended up creating or manually reviewing over 10,000 entries. This process took more than three months, working 10 hours a day.
After a few more months of building features I always wished existed in travel apps, I finally launched the app this March. The Android version has already passed 20,000 downloads, while the iOS version was released much later and still doesn’t have a meaningful user base yet. Some features that make it different from most travel apps are:
1. Gamified ranking system: Earn badges for achievements like visiting 10 countries, flying with every SkyTeam airline, or completing all major landmarks in Kuala Lumpur. Your global rank is based on the rarity and difficulty of the badges you collect.
2. Personalized country profiles: Every country page combines travel information (history, economy, safety, etc.) with your own travel history, including visit dates, transport methods, and explored landmarks.
3. Random but fun travel statistics: Track things like what percentage of former empires you’ve explored or how many cities you’ve visited where Cristiano Ronaldo has played.
4. AI traveler personality analysis: Uses survey responses and your travel history to identify your travel style and recommend destinations that fit you.
5. AI diary parsing: Automatically extracts countries, cities, landmarks, flights, trains, and buses from natural-language diary entries and logs them into your database.
6. Landmark & UNESCO database: Includes thousands of attractions worldwide, including all 1,200+ UNESCO World Heritage Sites, along with historical information and custom illustrations for major landmarks.
7. Activity tracking: Beyond countries and landmarks, the app also lets you track unique travel activities such as cruises, cable cars, amusement parks, famous local foods, global restaurant chains, and even major artworks you’ve seen around the world.
8. Flight tracking map: Visualizes your entire flight history with detailed statistics such as aircraft types, mileage, seat classes, layovers, lounges, and pricing. Recent flights can be added quickly using only the flight number and date.
9. Travel sharing profiles: Share your travel history with others, including visited countries, cities, flight routes, landmarks, timelines, and personal ratings for each destination.
Looking ahead, I’d also love to expand the app with more community-oriented features if enough travelers start using it:
1. Comparative analytics: Compare your stats and achievements with other travelers and discover destinations popular among users with similar travel styles.
2. Public traveler profiles: Let users share their travel history, ratings, timelines, and visited destinations with others.
As someone who travels a lot myself, I still constantly find things I wish travel apps did better. If there’s anything you’ve always wanted from a travel app but never found, I’d genuinely love to hear it.
Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ahnlee.jidoapp
I travel fairly often and realized I kept wanting to track more than just countries. I wanted to remember cities I visited, flights I took, airports I passed through, and sometimes specific landmarks.
Most travel apps focus on planning trips, but I was more interested in keeping a detailed travel history.
So I started building Travellog as a small side project. The idea is simple: log countries, cities, flights, airports and landmarks so you can see your travel history on a map and with some basic stats.
It's still very early and I'm mainly exploring whether other travelers would actually find something like this useful.
Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ahnlee.jidoapp
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the post-trip memory use case is really underserved - most travel apps obsess over planning and booking, but the "what did i actually do and where" side gets ignored. apps built for a specific type of traveler with a real personal use case usually find their early users faster than broad tools because there's almost always a tight community around the niche. frequent flyers, route trackers, and "countries visited" people are passionate and talk to each other. are you finding any particular travel community responding to it early?
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Sorry for the late reply — honestly didn't expect anyone to see this post.
At 20K downloads now, but most of it is paid. Organic is tough because a few established apps own the top keywords on the Play Store. Putting a lot into features and design but still figuring out how to break through. Trying a few things.
Thanks for the comment — genuinely helpful.
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