Geocaching Lets You Earn Souvenirs For Completed Geotours But They Screwed Up

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If you are into Geocaching, you probably know the terms souvenir and Geotour. If not, here are a quick explanation. Geocaching is an outdoor treasure hunt, to get a better understanding watch this video.

Now with your account, you can collect souvenirs, they are like stickers in an album. For certain tasks, you get a souvenir like the International Geocaching Day, which was just a few days ago on August 18, 2018. Most of the active community loves to collect these virtual stickers as well. There are many ways to get them and a new way was introduced by Geocaching.com not too long ago.

Some of my collected souvenirs.

You can earn souvenirs for completing a Geotour. A Geotour is a challenge where you have to find caches and do certain tasks. Like writing down a number inside the cache box and record it on the tours specific “passport”. Every tour is different, and some of them have you stamp a passport, some only want you to write down a number or code word. It is basically up to the creator how they set up the tour.

At the end of the tour and by completing the tasks for a tour, you get a reward. Most of the time it is a Geocoin that you can track on Geocaching.com or other swag. Like I said, every tour is different and it is up to the creator what to offer at the end of the tour for people who complete the necessary tasks.

Now it is great to show a souvenir for official Geotours, which are listed on www.geocaching.com. But here is where Geocaching.com screwed up, big time.

A list of GeoTours on www.geocaching.com

To get a souvenir added to your profile you have to find all of the caches for this specific Geotour. However, you can complete some of the Geotours without finding every single one of them. Most of the time the creators have hidden more geocaches than necessary to make sure people can find enough caches even if one gets missing. This is a great way of setting up a GeoTour and I would highly recommend it. Especially if it involves driving all over a state like the Visit Utah Geotour.

I completed the tour but it was not an easy one. I spend days on it and drove a few hundred, even a thousand miles to complete it. It was quite an achievement to finish the tour. Every of Utah’s 29 counties has 5 geocaches hidden which are part of the tour. This makes a total of 145 geocaches in the Geotour. However, to successfully complete it, you have to find only 3 geocaches in every county which adds up to 87 geocaches.

Now to be actually able to collect the souvenir for completing this tour, you would have to find all 145 caches of this Geotour. Sometimes some are deactivated because the boxes got stolen or went missing. If you are just unable to log 1 single geocache, you won’t get the souvenir.

I already contacted geocaching.com about this and explained it to them but after that, they ignored me completely. It’s a little bit of childish behavior in my eyes from the #1 geocaching site in the world. A little bit more respect for your community members. We pay your bills, at least partially, by signing up for premium accounts and pay year after year.

So why not be able to send in some kind of approval from the Geotour owner that you complete the tour to get the souvenir as well? Is that too much? I don’t think it would be to much work to take care of this. Maybe even have an automated system or let the Geotour-owner approve you. That would take the responsibility away from Geocaching.com and would distribute the “workload” to the tours people actually complete.

GeoTours are all about business. It’s about bringing people to a region and the geocachers will go there and spend money at local businesses like hotels and restaurants.

If you think, Geocaching.com should work on how they award these souvenirs, let them know on their social channels like Twitter, Facebook or just send them an email.

Besides the official Geotours listed on www.geocaching.com, there are many more out there. Some known and some not so much like the small geocaching challenge in Santa Cruz.

That’s why I started my own Geocaching Tour/Challenge Index. I listed tours and challenges I have found and taken to give you an overview. Most of them I just found randomly while out geocaching. So if you are looking for one, check out my list and maybe you are lucky and there is one nearby.

Please also let me know if you know about additional geocaching challenges/tours which are not listed or if there are any issues with the listed once on my side. This will help me to keep the list up to date.

 

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