What’s new in Wander

Find the destination’s published guides, tours and challenges in a photo shelf on the web map. The Guides tab keeps those recommendations together, while Saved holds your own lists. Guide cards show their stop counts, and a View link takes you straight to a list after you save a place.

The website map now groups nearby places, trails and areas into clusters that show the mix of categories. Preview photos, choose a place from the cluster, or zoom in to spread the pins out. Featured places stay visible outside the clusters, and visitors can explore them with a mouse or by touch. The developer SDK remains pre-1.0.

Pick the start and end of a stretch on the builder’s map, then give it a name and description. Visitors can find named sections on the web map and in list and simple embeds, and trail alerts can point to the affected stretch. Website developers can highlight a section from page content with the versioned SDK 0.9.0; the unversioned SDK still serves 0.8.0. These updates cover the web experience.

Upload audio clips, add transcripts, and upload or generate video captions in the builder. Visitors can listen and watch on supported web maps and embeds wherever your team has added media. Guide previews in the builder now play video and place narration, too.

Business owners can now follow their claim link into any destination’s map. Destination teams see clearer before-and-after descriptions and which claims are waiting on an owner, and owners receive an email when their submitted photos are live. Photos and descriptions still go through the destination team’s review. The 3D place view is available on desktop.

Paste a list of places or import from a link, review what belongs on your map, and arrange your stops into days. Preview a suggested walking or driving order before applying it; if route times are unavailable, the builder labels its straight-line estimate. Add a tip to each stop, then publish and share the guide from the same workspace. You choose which imported suggestions to apply.

Simple map embeds now give phone visitors a clear choice: Explore Map on Web or Explore in the App. Shared Wander links also keep video and audio files out of the preview image, so a place with rich media still has a suitable image when one is available.

The new Getting here widget compares driving with flight options from nearby airports, including the drive and airport time in the journey. It is live on Explore Julian, built by Wander as a reference destination. Journey times are estimates; this is a comparison tool, with any bookings completed elsewhere. Ask Wander about setting it up for your destination.

Late-night and 24/7 places now stay “Open” past midnight on the Wander web map, and business owners can set a closing time like 2 AM (next day).

In the builder, pick a basemap from previews of your own destination, set the color and strength of the shading outside your boundary, and check your brand colors before visitors see them. Custom map styles are still set up by Wander.

Business owners can claim their listing inside the destination’s official map while it circles their place in 3D. They check details, set hours and add photos, and the destination’s team approves photos and descriptions. It is a pilot on one destination’s map, and the 3D view is on desktop.

Local businesses and destination teams can post deals on the official map. Travelers using the Wander iPhone app find them on the map and redeem them in person with a staff PIN, a QR placard at the counter or a code. Deals don’t appear in website embeds.

Wander can pull events from a public calendar feed, such as the Localist calendars Pennsylvania state parks use, refresh them every day and pin each one to the right venue. We set up each feed for you.

In the builder, click places on your map to add them as stops, drag them into order and into days, and see the tour route and each check-in zone drawn to scale as you go. Guides, itineraries, self-guided tours and check-in challenges all start here.

With the Wander connector for Claude, your team can fill in details and photos for up to 100 places in one approved step: fields that already have content are skipped, and new photos are added alongside the ones you have. You can also import trails and areas from GeoJSON and write photo descriptions. Most changes, and every deletion, are shown to you for approval first. It needs a Wander organization account.

One call to your map’s feed returns every place with its website, phone number and last-updated time. Wander can also sync listings in from a JSON feed your CMS already publishes, and we set that up for you.

On the web map and the full-map embed, nearby places now gather into clusters that show the mix of categories at a glance. Hover over a pin or a cluster to see photos of the places inside.

On the web, places and events your team supplies now carry a “Listing information by” line with your organization’s name, linked to your website. The latest Wander iPhone app credits your destination by name too. We switch it on during your build.

In low-signal destinations, Wander can save the map to a visitor’s iPhone over Wi-Fi before they lose service, and offer a light download on the spot when the connection weakens. Wander switches it on for each destination.

One Wander link or QR code works on any device, and a printed code can now open your map at the exact view you choose when you make it. That works on the web for everyone, and in the latest Wander iPhone app.

Share or paste a link from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, Threads or Pinterest, or from any web article, and Wander puts the places it mentions on your map.

In current Android store builds, visitors can use Wander in Spanish and read places, tours, guides and events in 16 languages, with a Listen button that reads the text aloud. Translation is by machine, happens on the fly so it matches your latest edits, and needs a connection. Availability on other visitor platforms is not yet confirmed.

On iPhone, challenges now have a postcard-style card, a “You’re here” moment at each stop, a stamp for every check-in and a confetti finish.

A place can show what it connects to: the parking for a trail, the trailhead, food nearby. Connections now work both ways, so a parking lot shows the trails it serves. Your team or ours links the places, and the app needs its latest version to show them.

Travelers can follow your destination in the Wander iPhone app. Your team can write, test and send updates to those followers from the builder, with built-in limits on length, frequency and late-night sends.

Change a convention guide’s dates, venue and welcome message after launch, and hand the meeting planner a report on attendees and top stops. Delegates use the guide in the Wander app.

Businesses claim their listing on your map from one link: they confirm by phone, check their hours, details and photos, and your team reviews each claim before it is marked as theirs.

Visitors and business owners can suggest updates to hours, photos and details. Your team sees who sent each one and the change beside what’s there now, then applies it in one click.

In the builder, drag a pin to move it, format place descriptions with rich text, and create categories as you go.

Turn your signature places, like a stadium, a historic hall or a mountain, into illustrated Landmarks that stay on screen as visitors zoom around your map: on the web, in your website embed and in the Wander app. Each one is drawn for its place, by Wander or by your team.

The builder now works at phone width, with a slide-out menu, touch-sized controls and pins you can drag into place. It is made for quick edits on the go.

Visitors can search inside the site embed. Your places come first, and places you haven’t mapped can turn up under “Elsewhere”. Your dashboard shows the site-embed searches that led outside your map, so you know what to add next.

Built by Wander as a reference destination, explorejulian.com shows one Wander map powering place pages, an events calendar, live river and weather conditions, and trip planning that hands off to the app.

On explorejulian.com, built by Wander as a reference destination, visitors can sign in with Wander, build a dated trip and open the same trip in the app, and the sign-up is credited to the destination. Each new website needs Wander to set it up.

Put your official map beside every page of your website. Your pages tell it which places to spotlight, and it answers with photo pins, numbered stops, trail lines and a place card. Your web team adds it with our embed SDK, served from developer.wandermaps.com; the SDK is pre-1.0, so its API may change before 1.0.

Wander’s team can write map-linked stories with you. Every place mentioned is a real pin on your map, and each story publishes as a search-ready page with structured data, listed in your map’s llms.txt.

Sign-up now accepts international phone numbers. Sign-ups are phone-verified; Wander never shares visitors’ numbers with destinations.

Post a closure, detour or condition alert from the builder, for a whole trail or one stretch of it, with the dates it applies. Visitors see it on that trail in your map, your website embeds and the Wander app. Alerts don’t send notifications.

Your analytics now filter out bot and crawler traffic and credit embed traffic to the website it came from: first-party, bot-filtered analytics in your own dashboard. It applies to data from August 29 on.

Your analytics now include a heat map of where people use your map, routes you can scrub through, and the flows between areas. It counts app users who shared their location, is anonymized and hides small groups.

Invite trusted local partners, such as a trail club or a business owner, to help keep specific places, trails or areas of your map accurate. You decide whether each one can suggest changes or publish them.

Your web team can let your own page steer a Wander itinerary or listing embed: tap a listing and the map flies to it, switch days and the map follows. It is a small, versioned JavaScript SDK with live demos and recipes. Changing the set of places reloads the embed.

See how many travelers already have places from your map on a trip starting in the next 30, 60 or 90 days. Businesses see the same for their own listing. Counts below 3 are hidden.

After claiming, a business sees how it appears on the official map and keeps its hours current in one place. Save counts appear once enough travelers have saved it.

Creators can type an Instagram or YouTube handle, or paste a link, pick their posts, and Wander pins the places onto a map they can take into the app.

Visitors on your full interactive map can ask a question in plain English and get photo cards of places from your official map. Asking needs a free Wander sign-in with a verified phone number.

developer.wandermaps.com gives your web team or agency public docs for every embed, the embed SDK, the REST API for your own maps and the Wander connector for Claude.

Send the businesses on your map a co-branded email or text in your destination’s name, inviting them to claim their listing. You import the contacts, choose who gets it, preview the message and follow each business from contacted to active. Texts go to US numbers only.

Make your Wander profile private: people who open it see a request-to-follow card, only followers you approve see your notes and posts, and you can block anyone.

The Wander app now runs self-guided tours of any length and shows each destination’s filters in the order it chooses, with A–Z browsing and “fly to matches”.