Let’s start with our newest update – our M@P regions are now included in ‘my map‘ and, well, mapped. You will find that if you click on ‘my travels’ and then navigate down to ‘my map’ and click.
As you can see on the screenshot above, some of the M@P regions can be seen as fully marked, but because so many of them are tiny, they are simply grouped and marked by numbers. Once you zoom in or click those numbers, you will be able to see them AND to see which NM region they belong to. Isn’t that great?
Apart from this amazing and much-needed update, we also added two toggle switches to the top. This will enable to either show or hide NomadMania regions and/or M@P regions on the map. Please note that you will always see your personalised map here with a colour indicating which regions have been marked as visited.
Now that we have that revealed, let us quickly review all things new on NomadMania in 2022. We really try to bring you new features regularly and we dare say that we are more regular than many big, paid-for services that can be found online. You will get the feeling once you read all this, so let’s go!
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In February, we introduced a brand new and quite unique ranking of travellers – the Low Passport Index ranking. The LPI Ranking lets travellers from countries that have a ‘worse’ passport compare their travel accomplishments amongst themselves, thus making things a bit fairer, at least with this aspect. The logical extension of such a ranking was also our Biggest LPI Traveller Award which went into the hands of Pongtharin Tanthasindhu from Thailand. As this was Pong’s second time being nominated for our Awards, we had already done an interview with him earlier this year.
Later on we expanded Triumphs and Achievements by adding more categories. While Triumphs are updated several times a day and you can always see what is happening in our dynamic community, Achievements are updated only 4 times a year. So if you are new around here, you will have to wait until our January release in order to see your Achievements roll in. We will also bring more categories once again, so stay tuned.
Let us remind you that we also updated our Terms and Conditions and our GDPR section in March and April. Soon we will update you with our new Privacy policy statement (in January), so please make sure that you read it.
In April we released some big masterlist changes: 28 regions were moved out of the Masterlist and onto our M@P regions list, while 28 new regions entered the Masterlist as a result of deeper splits of existing regions. Admittedly, this has caused some unwanted, technical mess and chaos, so if you haven’t checked your own visited regions and maps, please make sure you do so.
Following the April update, we started increasing our M@P list monthly, until it finally reached our initial goal of 1301 M@P regions, making it the secondary travel challenge worthy of the most extreme travellers. To make things even more interesting, we added more content and we introduced 1301 new pages – one for each M@P region.
While they still are a work in progress and don’t have much content except the map, this was a lot of work which was done by our IT head and tail Daniel. He surely well deserved his Best NomadMania team member Award for 2022, so thanks again, Daniel!
We made a plan this year – to further develop our Fixers section and to make it more appealing to for our members to use it more often. Hence, authenticated users of NomadMania are able to rate and comment on fixers, which hopefully brings more transparency and trust as of May.
Our dream is to have each member of NomadMania introduce (or comment or rate) at least one fixer that they had an experience with. This way you are helping the community, but also your hosts by increasing their chance to get more guests.
Now this was all about our website, but our app also received several cool new features this year. First, we introduced a feature of “create your own region” where you can pick a spot on the map (or make that your location) and select the radius that you want. This provides you with a “region” of 5/10/50/100 km around you and it includes all NM regions, M@Ps and Series in one spot so you can pick and choose what to see in the time that you have. Isn’t that just the coolest feature of a travel app ever? We certainly think so.
We also added a feature for making series more interactive on the app – now you can pick and choose categories that you actually like and remove the ones that don’t interest you. Try it out!
Back to the website where we introduced a unique list of 101 Essential Regions– both for NM and for M@P, which were hand-picked by our founder with the help of the Executive Committee. We had also fixed our Milestones and made them more automated for your convenience.
Last but not least – important “old” novelties on our website were the polls and referendum. From July to August, all users could’ve voted on a unique Poll about Trav and Ling’s travel adventures. This is our famous “What is a visit” poll and its results with almost 1000 responses were presented by our manager at the Extraordinary Travel Festival in Yerevan. You can still see the results here.
Following the first, we released the second poll of this kind in November which, be reminded, is still ongoing and needs your vote. This is your way to influence what happens next on NomadMania and with our “What is a visit?” guidelines. We will certainly be conducting more polls in 2023 on a variety of topics, so stay tuned and do participate!
