Dive Spot Page Upgrades, Planner Improvements, Wildlife Launch, and Destination
This has been one of the biggest DiveJourney releases yet.
Over the last few weeks I pushed hard on dive spot page quality, planner and conditions improvements, a focused research and upgrade flow for dive spots, wildlife v1, and a major destination expansion across six more countries and 37 destinations. I also spent a lot of time improving the systems behind the scenes so I can keep making DiveJourney better, faster, and more consistently.
🚀 What Shipped
- Major upgrade to dive spot pages (plus a clean redesign) with better summaries, stronger planning info, guide-style FAQs, source references, and much better page structure.
- A new research and publish flow that lets me improve groups of dive spots much faster, making DiveJourney more accurate, useful, and consistent over time.
- Conditions and weekly/day planner additions, including exposure handling in relation swell and wind direction, clearer marine vs inland behavior, and better trip-planning readability.
- Wildlife v1 is now live with wildlife pages, group/species surfaces, and wildlife linked across spots, destinations, and countries.
- Around 37 new deeply researched destination pages shipped, plus 6 country pushes.
- Roughly 300 dive spot detail upgrades shipped in this cycle.
- Internal but important - better admin and ops tooling for spot quality, review flows, confidence bands, rollout controls, and release reliability.
📈 Dive Spot Pages Got a Major Upgrade
Dive spot pages are now much more complete, useful, and structured. The new research and publish flow also gives me a much better system for turning upgraded spots into genuinely strong planning and discovery pages. This update rolled out on about 300 of the current dive spots and includes:
- better short summaries and context for upgraded dive spots (activity focused info, fees, access, coral, wildlife, etc.)
- stronger planning and safety structure (hazards and operator recommended - and why)
- guide-style FAQ sections
- sources and updates surfaces
- better nearby and similar spot context
- cleaner card and popup behavior
- improved map and media fallback behavior
- stronger structured data and discoverability improvements
I’ve already rolled this out to roughly 300 spots, and this will continue expanding in future releases.
⛅ Planner and Conditions Improvements
The planner and conditions side got a major push too.
This update includes:
- stronger exposure and conditions logic
- clearer marine vs inland handling
- better severe-condition weighting
- more trustworthy planner behavior
- rollout support and operator tooling behind the scenes
This is a big one. If you’ve been waiting for a centralized trip planner and discovery platform with conditions as a first-class feature, this should make planning your dive week around weather and sea state much clearer and more useful.
🐟 Wildlife v1 Is Now Live
Wildlife is now a real part of the platform.
What is live now:
- public wildlife pages
- wildlife group and species surfaces
- wildlife linked across dive spots, destinations, and countries
- broader wildlife schema and data integration
This adds another discovery layer to the platform and makes destination and spot pages much richer.
Most dive spots now have core species coverage, and countries and destinations also link to the wildlife you’re most likely to encounter there. As I roll out more dive spot research upgrades, wildlife will become even more integrated into the platform.
I'm still missing some images for some of the wildlife pages (I'm limited by user submitted or opensource images on Unsplash at the moment), so if you have a photo of one of the animals please reach out and I'll add it to the wildlife page and attribute you.
Oh and I aim to also integrate wildlife tagging in the coming release so you can start tagging wildlife on your dive logs.
🗺️ New Destinations and Country Expansion
This cycle also included a big destination push.
Highlights:
- 6 country pushes shipped: Maldives, Philippines,New Zealand,Malaysia, Oman, South Africa
- Around 37 high-quality, deeply researched, connected destinations were added across those countries
🎥 Behind the Scenes
There are a lot of moving parts in DiveJourney now, and a lot more systems to maintain consistently across dive spot upgrades, exposure profiles, destinations, countries, wildlife, and research. So a lot of work this cycle also went into the systems that keep DiveJourney improving.
- better spot review and enrichment ops
- campaign tracking and country/destination scoping
- confidence-aware controls and rollout safety for dive spot upgrades and spot exposure profiles
- cleaner admin review context as more user submitted spot improvements and logs have been coming through the system
🔮 What’s Next
Next up I’m focused on:
Mobile is coming next. I’m actively building the official DiveJourney mobile experience for divers who want a better way to explore spots, track dives, and take DiveJourney with them on the go. If you want early access for iPhone and Android, join the mobile app waitlist.
🤝 Dive Shops
If you run a dive shop and want to be featured cleanly on the DiveJourney map and destination ecosystem, you can start with a shop account or apply for the destination partner program.
DiveJourney is getting much stronger on destination depth, spot quality, and planning utility - and I’m continuing to build this out to be the best scuba, freediving, and snorkel platform for trip planning and community.