Klaas
May 18, 2026
Another big update.
The Community is Coming to Life
A lot has changed on 12TravelBuddy lately. Here's what's new — and why it makes finding your next travel buddy a whole lot easier.
Dream it, plan it, find your people
Travel starts with a list in your head. Now it has a place to live.
Every member can keep a personal bucketlist of countries they want to visit — drag them into whatever order makes sense, mark individual ones as private if you're not ready to share, and flip the whole thing public when you are. Check out someone's profile and you'll see where they're dreaming of going next. That's often a better conversation starter than where they've already been.
The world map picked up on this too. It used to show just where members are right now. Now it shows three things at once: where people are travelling, where people want to travel (bucketlist countries glow amber), and — newest of all — where people have upcoming planned trips (those show up in sky blue). Scroll over a country and you get a real sense of the community around it, not just who happened to be there last week.
On individual country pages, there's now a card showing other members who have that destination on their wishlist. And if someone is currently there and has it on their list, they get a "Ticking it off!" badge. Small touch, but it makes the pages feel alive.
Actual dates, actual plans
For a travel community, we were embarrassingly vague about dates. That's fixed.
When you post a trip you now set a proper start and end date with a date picker — no more freehand text. Not sure of the exact dates yet? Check "Approximate dates" and it shows up with a badge so people know your window is flexible. Trip cards and detail pages all show the dates cleanly now.
Those dates power something genuinely useful: the new /calendar page. It pulls together all upcoming trips and meetups from across the community, sorted by date, in one public page anyone can browse without logging in. Switch between a list view and a calendar grid, or filter it down to a specific date range. If you're planning a trip and want to see who else is on the move around the same time, this is where you look.
The UK, properly
England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are now real destinations on the site — not just footnotes under "United Kingdom". You can select any of them when posting a trip, creating a meetup, or filling in your profile. Each nation has its own destination hub page with its own members, trips, and meetups, and there's a combined /destination/united-kingdom page that rolls them all up together.
Easier to use, faster to load
Behind the scenes — and sometimes in front of it — the experience got a meaningful polish.
There's now a My Dashboard at /my-dashboard: a personal home base with quick links to everything you care about, plus a live feed of what your connections have been up to. The navigation menu was streamlined at the same time, and "My Posts" was renamed to "My Stories" — because that's what they are.
Profile photo uploads now include a crop tool so you can frame your picture exactly right, and the image is automatically saved in a smaller, optimised format. The homepage hero loads several times faster on mobile than it used to. The site overall feels snappier — less jumping around when pages first load, quicker initial load times.
A lot more in the works. In the meantime — post a trip, add some countries to your bucketlist, and see who's planning to be in the same place as you.