Visited Places is the Apple Maps feature that quietly keeps a list of the places you have been, so you can find that restaurant again. A lot of people went looking for it after reading about it and found nothing in their Maps app. Usually the reason is not a setting. It is that the feature is not offered in their country at all.
Apple publishes this itself, on the iOS and iPadOS Feature Availability page, under Maps: Visited Places. This is the list as it stood on 21 September 2026, for iOS and iPadOS 27:
If your country is not in that list, no toggle will bring the feature back, because there is no toggle to find. Apple's own user guide ends the Visited Places page with the same warning in one line: Visited Places isn't available in all countries or regions.
(iPhone User Guide.)
Some large markets that are not on it: every country in the European Union, Japan, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Hong Kong, mainland China, South Korea. Apple changes these lists over time, so the page above, not this one, is the authority — I will re-check it and date this page when it moves.
Look closely at the list and the pattern is visible: Norway and Switzerland are on it, and no EU member state is. Réunion and Saint Barthélemy are on it, and both are French territories, so the line is not drawn purely on geography.
Apple has tied the absence of several iOS 26 features in the European Union to the Digital Markets Act — its own statement on that is on Apple Newsroom, and the specific confirmation that Visited Places was among the delayed features was reported by iDownloadBlog in June 2025. heise online adds a detail worth knowing before your next trip: an iPhone in the EU is reported not to record visits even while you are travelling somewhere the feature exists.
I am not going to tell you whose fault that is. The practical question is what you do about it, and the answer is: assume it is not coming this year, and treat the rest of this page as the workaround. I have not tested whether changing your Apple Account or device region unlocks it, and I would not change either one for a Maps feature.
Then it is one of four ordinary things:
The switch itself, as documented step by step by iDownloadBlog: Settings → Apps → Maps → Location, with Precise Location on, then turn on Visited Places; and Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → System Services, with Significant Locations & Routes enabled.
One setting is worth checking the first day, because it is destructive later: at the bottom of the Visited Places list there is Keep Visits. It decides how long a visit survives before the phone deletes it, and Forever is a choice you have to make. If you are turning this on precisely so that you will still have the list in five years, set it now.
It is worth being clear about the feature before you mourn it, because a lot of the articles about it are written as though it were a travel map. It is not.
So even in the United States, where the feature does work, it answers a different question from "which countries and cities have I actually been to, and when".
In this order, because the first two cost nothing and take minutes.
Photos → Library → the menu button → Show Map. Apple's guide for this is here, and it states the one limit that matters: only pictures and videos that carry embedded location data appear.
This works in every country, on old iPhones, and it covers years that no tracking feature was ever switched on for. If you want to turn that map into an actual list of countries, I wrote out the whole method — including the free command-line version — in how to get your countries out of your photos.
Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → System Services. On iOS 26 and later it is listed as Significant Locations & Routes. It is kept on the device, and it is a rough record rather than a travel log — there is no export, and it is not organised by trip. Useful for checking a date. Not useful as a map.
I keep a longer, priced version of this list on my comparison page.
Disclosure, and the part where I mention my own app. I make Driftlog, an iPhone app in this category, which is why I know this corner of the store well enough to write the page.
It covers the same gap from the other side: it records the countries, regions and cities you pass through while the app is closed, using the phone's coarse significant-location signal, and it reads the location data already in your photos to reconstruct trips from before you installed it. It sells for a one-time $6.99, with no subscription, no ads and no account; the free version records your home country in full and names the rest. It runs on iOS 17 and later, and unlike the Apple feature it is sold in EU stores.
The honest limits: it records places, never routes; live recording needs Location set to Always with Precise Location on, which is a real thing to be asked for; photo import needs Photos access set to All Photos and can only see photos that carry location; a coordinate does leave the phone to be turned into a place name, which is reverse geocoding and is the one outbound request it makes; and it is a keepsake, not a legal record — do not count visa days with it.
How this page was made. The country list was read from Apple's own feature availability page on 21 September 2026 and typed out in full rather than summarised. Where a claim comes from a news site rather than from Apple, I have said so and linked it. If something here is wrong or has changed, email me at shiori.sutudio@gmail.com and I will correct it and re-date the page.