Your Travel Identity Has Nowhere to Live

On my coffee table is a cork globe my sister gave me for my birthday a few years ago. The idea is lovely. You place a flag pin in every country you have visited, stand back, and admire the travel life you have built one trip at a time.

In practice, the pins fall out. I will often find them on the floor, and when I cannot tell which country a stray flag belongs to, I just park it in the Pacific until I have time to figure it out. There are, at the moment, quite a few flags floating in the ocean.

I am also the kind of person who created a spreadsheet to track my travels. My travel tracker spreadsheet has eleven columns, a tab for US states, and a dashboard. Alaska is marked Partial, with a note reminding me that a layover in Anchorage does not count. It took me quite a while to build, and where I want to go next lives in a second spreadsheet entirely, because the first one only looks backward. So that is my system. A globe that drops its pins, and two files no one will ever see.

Almost everyone has a version of this. A scratch map with visited countries scratched off. A count of countries you could guess but would have to do on your fingers. Wherever your travel life lives right now, it has the same two problems mine does. It does not live anywhere you can share, and it only ever looks backward.

To be fair, the apps that track where you have been have gotten good. Several will map every country you have visited and make it beautiful. I have tried most of them. But they are a rear view mirror. They show you where you have been and stop there. None of them know where you want to go next, and none of them help you get there.

That is one of the gaps I built Stax to close.

Stax is one place for your whole travel identity, the trips behind you and the ones still ahead. Keep a Wanderlist of everywhere you dream of going, and when you are ready to take a trip, open a Stack and start saving toward it.

Every Stack you open and every trip you take builds your Stax Passport, a living map of where you have been and where you are headed, on a profile at https://stax.cash with your own handle, that you can share. The pins do not fall out. Nothing floats in the Pacific.

But the map is just one part of it. Stax gives you a real estimate of what a trip will cost, lets you invite friends and family to contribute toward it, and earns you rewards when you book through Stax partners. That is how Stax helps you build your travel resume, not just record it.

A good resume was never only about the past. It also highlights where you are going next. That is what Stax is, the first travel resume that looks forward as much as back, and then actually helps you get there.

From someday to stacked.

Mine is at https://stax.cash/@steve. If you have been a lot of places and never had a clean way to hold onto it, or you have a head full of trips you keep meaning to take, this one is for you.

Stax is live today. Make your map.

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Pioneering Social Travel Savings as the founder of Stax. Traveler to 50+ countries across six continents, two-time VC-backed CEO, former WW Head of AWS Technology Solutions.