Your Phone Just Became Part of the Landing Ritual

There's a moment every traveling family knows. The wheels touch down, the seatbelt light is still on, and every phone in the row comes out of airplane mode at once. It's the first minute of the trip actually beginning.

Starting this week, DuckAbroad is part of that moment.

Introducing Airport Arrival Alerts. When you land, DuckAbroad welcomes you with a notification: "You've landed at Dublin Airport!" Tap Log Landing right on the notification and the airport goes into your family's travel journal. If it's a new airport, the sticker joins your collection. You never have to open the app or remember to check in later.

If you're wearing an Apple Watch or Wear OS watch, the notification and the Log Landing button appear right on your wrist. You can collect a new airport before you reach the gate, while your hands are full of backpacks and boarding passes.

Why we built this. We kept forgetting. We'd land somewhere exciting, dive into the trip, and realize three days later that we never logged the airport. The stamps and stickers in DuckAbroad exist to make travel memories stick, but a collection only works if the collecting happens in the moment. So we moved the collecting to the moment.

This works for repeat visits too. If you fly through the same airport every summer on the way to the grandparents, DuckAbroad says welcome back. The tenth trip through your home airport is part of your family's travel story.

A note on privacy. Arrival alerts are optional. When you update the app, we explain the feature and ask for your permission before anything turns on. If you'd rather skip it, everything else in DuckAbroad works exactly as before. Location is used to recognize when you've arrived at an airport and nothing more.

Airport Arrival Alerts are rolling out now in DuckAbroad for iPhone and Android. Update the app, take a trip, and let the landing log itself.

Where are you flying next? Tell us which airport your family collects first on BlueSky.

— Chris & Duckwyn