AllTrails’ hiking and biking app, which was named the iPhone App of 2023, has launched a new premium membership, “Peak”that includes a set of upgraded features. This $80 per year subscription will include AI tools for building custom routes, real-time trail conditions forecasts, heatmaps of trail traffic, and a feature to identify trees and plants with your phone’s built-in camera.
This new option will be rolled out to selected members in the coming weeks and then to all users globally by June. AllTrails users are able to sign up for Early access on its website
AllTrails, a popular outdoor app, raised $150 million for a growth round in 2021 during the COVID pandemic when people began to reconnect with nature amid lockdowns. Apple Maps in America added support for topographic mapping with trailheads and contour lines. It also included hill shading, elevation gain, and other features. Apple’s encroachment continued the following year with features such as offline maps, custom route, and tools for exploring national parks and other trail outside the U.S.
For example, the new AI-powered feature of the Peak membership allows users to build their ideal trails either from scratch or by customizing existing ones. The AI-powered Smart-Routing feature can change a trail to make it shorter, less steep or “more scenic,” for example.
A new trail conditions forecast provides information on temperature, precipitation and snow depth. It is essentially a weather app integrated into AllTrails. There are also alerts on things like air quality or mosquito activity. Later updates will include terrain and ground conditions like pavement, gravel or mud.
The added heatmap option can help hikers and bikers who hate getting stuck on crowded trails, as well as those who prefer a crowd for safety purposes, like when hiking alone. To work, the app’s access to millions of users’ activity provides it with traffic data to make estimates, similar to how Google Maps uses data to predict when a store, restaurant, bar, or other venue is the most “busy.”
This summer, Peak members will also gain access to an Outdoor Lens feature, which lets them instantly identify a tree, plant, or flower and log it in the app. Over time, more identification features will be added to the Lens, the company notes.
In addition to Peak’s launch, AllTrails is rolling out updates to its Base and Plus memberships.
Base is the company’s free offering with trail maps, community reviews, and navigation, while Plus adds offline access, wrong-turn alerts, 3D trail previews, and live trail activity sharing. Across all tiers, AllTrails has over 80 million registered users.
Both will receive a feature called Points of Interest, which adds more than 500,000 mapped viewpoints, landmarks, and trail amenities to the app. Plus subscribers, meanwhile, will also gain a feature called Offline Area, which lets them download a customized area for offline exploration that includes high-resolution maps and other details.
Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
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