The planner you can't trust :(
I generally like Komoot. Even after the BS acquisition, I still think it is a very good tool. But sometimes I just want to log out, delete my account and ask: does anyone actually test this thing in real life?
I have just come back from a few days of cycling in Brandenburg, where twice a route planned in Komoot and navigated on my Explore 2 turned out to be significantly different from the original route I had planned. I'm not talking about a small reroute around a closed path - I'm talking about differences of several kilometres.
Now I am planning another multi-day trip, this time through Flanders, and I've found another example where Komoot completely ignores my intentions and quietly rewrites my route. The same happened in Brandenburg.
Here's a very specific example:
the map shows part of my planned route near Genk. That "hook" in the south-west is there for a reason - it leads to one of the best-known cycling highlights in Europe, "Cycling through the Water" (red arrow):
Now I use the "Plan day-by-day itinerary" feature and simply place one of my overnight stops where the blue arrow is. The result? The entire section leading to Cycling through the Water disappears:
As you can see from the coloured waypoints, I had explicitly added those highlights to my route. Yet nothing warns me that Komoot has removed an entire section. It simply decides that I no longer want to visit one of the main highlights of my trip.
I'm an experienced cycle tourist and I've planned countless routes, so I spotted it immediately. But what if this happened to someone planning their first cycling holiday? They could easily arrive home without ever realising that Komoot had quietly removed one of the places they most wanted to see.
The worst part is that I'm starting to lose trust in the planner. I now feel I have to review every multi-day route almost turn by turn to make sure Komoot hasn't silently changed something important somewhere else.
This is already the second longer trip in a short period where this has happened. The previous case was almost identical, on the Tour Brandenburg route near Rathenow in Germany.
I'm also a Premium user. I pay for Komoot because I expect it to save me time and give me confidence when planning my trips. Instead, I end up spending even more time checking whether the planner has changed my routes behind my back. That's _incredibly_ frustrating.
Komoot team - this isn't meant to be a dramatic rant. I know building routing software is difficult and I appreciate your work. But does anyone on the team actually use these planning tools to prepare real multi-day cycling trips?
From a cyclist's perspective this isn't a minor bug. It's exactly the kind of problem that makes you stop trusting the planner.
:(