Major Updates to Places2Swim
The first major update to the Places2Swim website in several years went online on October 22, 2026.
October Activities
Were you surprised?
After several years of work, including interviews with several regular users and contributors to the site, and almost a year of daily conference calls with our incredibly talented and creative programmer, Places2Swim.com Version 4.0 went online on October 22, 2026. We were only a few days behind our original target to go live on October 15th, so not bad.
Here is a list of just a few of the hundreds of changes that have gone into the new site:
Filtering: Users can now put limitations on what they want to see:
- You can choose to see competition-length pools only (50-meters, 25-meters, and 25-yards).
- You can choose to see only certain types of listings (college/university facilities, public pools, schools, private clubs, YMCAs, community service organizations, military facilities, and hotels).
- You can choose by pool environment (indoor, outdoor, convertible, or other).
- You can limit your search to see only facilities that host organized teams and clubs (Masters swimming, Triathlon, Youth [or Age Group] swimming, diving [fancy], water polo teams, artistic swimming, lifesaving, fin swimming, underwater hockey, and SCUBA diving).
- You can choose to see only facilities that have diving boards and or platforms.
- Or you can choose by water temperature range (five ranges are made available in your choice of either Celsius or Fahrenheit).
And you can use all of these filters together, for example, you could choose to see only the listings that have 50-meter, outdoor, college pools that host Masters swim teams in pools where they keep the water between 77º and 79ºF (25º and 26ºC).
The Passport: Another new feature is the Passport where you can set up an account to track the pools you have visited, flag your favorites, pick up a flag-like passport stamp for the country, see a map with a stamp for every swim you've logged and share your map with your friends. There's even a little video, less than a minute long, that shows how it works, with a "Watch the video" button near the top of the Passport page. People who sign up for a passport also can suggest additions and changes, and submit reviews and photographs without entering their names and email addresses on those forms. As long as you're logged in, you can skip those steps any time you connect with us. For this feature, we will collect only your name, email address, and where you live.
In keeping with our practices for the last 30+ years,we will not use your information to spam you or to create a mailing list for sale to others. We will not use it to track you. When you trust us with information that helps us, it makes it in our interest to honor your privacy.
Photographs: After 30 years without then, we finally added photographs. We've gone to the Wikimedia Commons website and downloaded hundreds of free-use photographs of the pools. So far most of the photos we have show only the outsides of the facilities; there are a few inside photos, but in this new site you can take your own photos of the pools and upload them to the listing. (Please do not send photos to which you do not own the rights, or selfies, or photos that are unrelated to the listing.)
Travel tips We've added a "Travel tips" section where we've collected and published hundreds of entries at the international, national, state/province, county/region, and city levels. There we tell you about the particular swimming customs (generally at the country level) that may surprise you, and we provide links to help you find other pools, especially seasonal pools that we do not list on the site currently.
Reorganization of the listing detail page: We have completely reorganized the order in which the individual pools' data is presented. In setting up the new detail listing page template, we put the photos first; pool and diving equipment descriptions second; admission information third; and address and contact information fourth. That's almost exactly the opposite of the old version's order.
We made the change because we think it follows the flow of how you decide where you want to swim. First you want to know whether the pool is acceptable (the right size, indoors or outdoors, and the water temperature); second you want to know whether you can get in and, if so, at what cost; finally, you want the address, phone number and points of contact. Then we added a map inserted right in the page, another new feature. If you have location services enabled on your device, that map will give you turn-by-turn directions to the pool from your precise location. The map insert is followed by the teams, reviews, and the Travel Tips sections.
Blogs: Moving up a level, we've split the "What's New" section into a Monthly featured pools or Pools worth a detour page and a Places2Swim Blog.
What's Next:
In the very short term, we have a couple of fixes that need to be made: We realized that there has never been a logical place on the site where you could tell us that a pool had closed, either permanently or for extended renovations or had a change in pool operators; that needs to be fixed! And, after the site went online we discovered that on some smartphones, the "Submit" button to send suggested changes may be inaccessible; you may want to tell us something, you type it in, and you can't send it; that's got to be corrected, too!
Apps: After that, iPhone and Android apps are on the way. We have already begun testing the Android app and it looks great. Unfortunately, it had at least one major bug to be ironed out, so we've put the release aside until we have resolved the immediate problems in the web version. We expect those to be resolved in fairly short order and, once they have been, we'll begin intensive testing of the apps.
Seasonal Pools: Although it's a bit down the road, we are hoping we'll be able to allow the addition of seasonal pools to the site with functionality that allows them to appear on the maps only when open. We've added fields to the underlying database to show opening and closing dates for seasonal pools. That project will require some manpower (person-power?) to be able to process and maintain the massive volume of additional entries that project entails, but we're definitely working on it.
Water sanitization filter: We want you to be able to filter the listings by how the pools are sanitized (chlorine, bromine, saltwater, UV, ionization, and untreated).
Open water (spots, events, and vacations): Before all the changes above are implemented, we'll probably expand our coverage to open water swimming: places; competitive open water events; and open water swimming tours and vacations.
Site Statistics:
In October, we added 50 new listings to the site and deleted 10, for a net gain of 40 listings.
As of October 31, 2026, the Places2Swim database includes 26,916 facilities in 212 countries and 14,812 cities and towns.
In the site's "Top 10" countries there are 19,515 listings, broken down by country as follows: United States 7,771 (an increase of 8 since September), United Kingdom 2,231 (+2), France 1,667 (+1), Germany 1,582 (+1), Spain 1,505 (no change), Italy 1,196 (+4), Canada 1,017 (+1), Australia 1,016 (+2), Japan 902 (no change) and Poland 628 (+1). In the remaining 202 countries, there are 7,401 listings (+20).
Monthly Political Rant:
The Monthly Political Rant is being discontinued - for the time being.