Polarsteps: plan, track and relive your trips

A while ago I discovered the app Polarsteps: a travel app in which you can plan, track and relive your trips. I’ve used Polarsteps in several, previous of my roundtrips and I’m very excited about it! In this article I’ll tell you some more about the app and my experiences. Enjoy!

NOTE: this isn’t a sponsored post. I’ve written this article, because I’m enthusiastic about this app and would like to share my enthusiast with you.

A short introduction to Polarsteps

Polarsteps is a Dutch company which founders are passionate travelers. The app of Polarsteps gives you the possibility to plan, track and relive your trips (just as the title says):

• plan: when opening the app and creating a new trip (including destination and traveling dates) you can plan your trip by making a route on the shown map.
• track: when traveling, your phone (and the app) tracks your route you’re taking and shows it on the map. You can write your experiences and upload pictures at every place you’d like to. You can combine these stories and pictures with a destination you’ve been to during the trip.
• relive: after your trip, you can easily turn your ‘travel report’ into a travel book. Before ordering the travel book, you can add some text or pictures where ever you’d like to.

You can follow your friends / family or inspirational travelers for new ideas as well. I’ll tell you more per subject below.

Download the app + make an account

You can download Polarsteps as well for Android as for iOS (you can find the links on the website). You can either open Polarsteps on your mobile phone as on your computer / laptop. Personally, I prefer to open Polarsteps on my mobile phone when I’m planning a trip and when I’m actually doing the trip. As soon as I start creating my travel book, I love to work on my laptop.

The first step of starting with Polarsteps, is creating an account. You can sign up with Facebook, with Apple, but you can also create an account with your e-mail address.

How to create a new trip

When you’re logged in on Polarsteps, the next step is to create a new trip. You can easily go to this option by clicking on the ‘add a past, current or future trip’ on the main page when logged in. After, you can give a title to the trip, you can write a small text, you can add the travel dates and you can chose who will be able to see your trip (only me, my followers, public).

When you’ve created the trip, you can see how many nights to wait until your trip will start. How exciting! When your trip has already started, you can click on the places you’ve already been and you can plan the rest of your trip by making a route on the map.

During your trip

When you start your trip and you’ve created a new trip beforehand, the app will automatically track your location on the day that your trip is starting. The app tracks until the trip ends, so at the end you have a nice route shown on the world map. Normally, Polarsteps will use the location of telephone masts so it won’t cost you lots of money. At the moment you’ve wifi, Polarsteps will upload all data to your personal trip.

You can add photos or a travel story (your experiences) to each place on the route you’ve been. At each place you upload your experiences and/or photos, this is called a ‘step’. You can also change the arrival date and time + you can change the step name. At the end of the trip you’ll have a complete travel report with several steps.

Follow your friends and family

Keeping up a travel report during your trip is a great thing as you’ll have a really nice memory. However, friends/family who would also love to follow you during trip and who you’d like to keep updated are also able to follow you. In that way, they can read your adventures and see the photos you’ve shared. You friends/family are able to like a ‘step’ you’ve posted or to write a comment. Of course the other way around is possible as well. You can also follow your friends/family and see what they’re up to!

If you don’t want people to follow your trips, you can also set up your trip as ‘only visible for me’, so in that way it’s private. You can chose this option when you’re creating a new trip, but you can also change it at a later time. Furthermore, you can also chose to share your trip not only with your friends/family (followers), but also with any other person who’s using Polarsteps (public). In that way, you can maybe give some inspiration to other travelers.

Seek for inspiration

As told above, you can share your trips with anyone who’s using Polarsteps. You can also search for inspiration in trips of other travelers who’re sharing their trips with everyone. You can take a look at the menu item ‘editors’ choice’ where you’ll find all kinds of travel reports from other travelers around the world.

End of the trip? Create a travel book!

And when you’re back from your trip, you can create a travel book from the travel report you’ve made (on the website you can click on ‘Travel Books’ right in the upper corner). Your route, stories and photos will be shown in the travel book which you can order and receive at home. A really nice memory of your trip! Personally, I find the quality of the travel books very good. Depending on the amount of pages (length of trip and amount of steps / photos) the travel book costs between the € 30,- and € 80,-.

Good to know: you can change your trip at all times! If you’re starting with creating a travel book for example, you can still add some text or photos before ordering your travel book.

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In my opinion, Polarsteps is a really nice app and I’ve already used it for some of my round trips. As told before, this post is not sponsored, I would just like to share a discovery with you that I personally really like.

Did you already knew about Polarsteps? How do you think about the app?

Author: Tamara

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