About us

Built by travelers, for travelers

We are a small team of avid travelers who wanted a simple, beautiful way to track every country we've visited — and share it with the people who care about where we've been.

It started with a scratch map on a wall. You know the ones — the world covered in gold foil, where you scratch off each country you've visited to reveal the color underneath. We loved the idea. Watching the map fill up country by country felt genuinely satisfying. But scratch maps have a problem: they're static. You can't share them online. You can't add a wish list. You can't update them without tearing the paper. And you certainly can't fit the US states detail you want alongside the world map.

So we built exactly what we wanted. An interactive travel map that loads instantly, lets you click any country or US state to mark it visited, keeps your data saved, and makes it trivially easy to share with friends. No app download. No signup wall. Just a map and a click.

Why this, and not the dozens of other travel trackers?

Honestly, we tried them all. Most feel like they were built by engineers who don't travel, not travelers who happen to code. They're cluttered, slow, or locked behind accounts before you've even clicked a single country. The ones that do work well either charge a subscription or haven't been updated since 2015.

We wanted something that felt like it was designed in 2025. Beautiful cartography — we use the CartoDB Voyager basemap, the same warm cream style used by some of the best mapping publications in the world. Clean typography. A color palette that actually looks good when you screenshot it. Stats that update live as you click, so you can watch your “% of world visited” tick upward in real time.

Our collective travel CV

Between us, we've visited over 80 countries across all seven continents. We've taken overnight trains through Central Asia, rented motorcycles in Southeast Asia, road-tripped every US state west of the Mississippi, and spent more time than we'd like to admit figuring out visa requirements. We've debated — at length — whether an airport layover counts as “visiting” a country. (Our answer: yes, if you want it to. It's your map.)

That last point matters more than it sounds. Travel is personal. What counts as visited, what counts as “really” visiting, whether you need to sleep somewhere — none of that has a universal answer. My Travel Maps gives you the tools. You define your own rules. See our methodology for how we handle the edge cases that come up with borders and contested territories.

What we're building

Right now, My Travel Maps offers five tools: a world map where you can click countries and US states in one view, a dedicated countries visited map, a US states visited map, a city pins tool for marking specific places, and a road trip planner.

We're actively working on permanent map saving (with shareable URLs like mytravelmaps.org/map/yourname), downloadable images, a travel timeline by year, and an embed widget so you can put your map on your travel blog. If there's something you'd love to see, tell us — we genuinely read every message.

My Travel Maps is an independent project. We don't have investors or a corporate parent. We're just people who love travel and wanted a better tool. We hope it brings you the same small satisfaction it brings us — watching the map fill up, one country at a time.