Who would actually want to know how much time they’ve spent binge-watching series or movies? While some users might not mind, others could find that information a little too revealing and would rather keep it private.
As “Wrapped” has grown into a cultural phenomenon, many brands, companies, and products have jumped on the trend. Uber’s Youber, for example, offers a personalised recap of your year in rides and eats, neatly packaged within the app. Duolingo does something similar with its year in review, summarising lessons completed while also assigning users a playful personality profile.
In many ways, Wrapped has become the default template for how products reflect back user behaviour at the end of the year.
Where Wrapped Came From
Before deciding whether this is something every product should adopt, much like how Stories eventually became ubiquitous across social media, it’s worth understanding where Wrapped came from and what it was originally designed to achieve.
Spotify Wrapped, a year-in-review feature and viral marketing campaign by the Swedish audio streaming company Spotify, was first launched in 2015 under the name Year in Music. It was later rebranded as Wrapped and has evolved year after year.
At its core, Wrapped tells the story of a user’s musical journey over time, often inferring moods and personality traits based on listening habits, genres explored, artists followed, and tracks played repeatedly.
What made Spotify Wrapped stand out wasn’t the data itself, but how that data was treated. Spotify didn’t simply dump raw statistics on users. Instead, it transformed listening history into a narrative, one that users could recognise themselves in.
It went a step further by interpreting that data, suggesting what your taste in music might say about you. This made the experience feel personal, relatable, and most importantly, shareable.
Why Spotify Wrapped Works
Wrapped is deeply customer-centred. It’s not about celebrating Spotify as a brand. It celebrates the listener.
Their habits, preferences, and patterns are framed as something worth acknowledging and sharing. The visual design, animations, and playful language are not incidental. They are core to why Wrapped travels so well across social platforms.
It taps into something deeply human, the desire to belong, to be seen, and to participate in a shared moment. People share their Wrapped partly out of pride and partly out of fear of missing out. That collective sharing turns the feature into a cultural event.
When Wrapped Doesn’t Work
That said, I don’t believe the “year-in-review” or “Wrapped” concept is suitable for every product.
I’ve come across brands that simply present users with a wall of numbers and metrics, and my immediate reaction is usually, do users actually care about this? In many cases, these recaps feel impersonal and disconnected, more like internal dashboards than meaningful reflections.
They lack context, interpretation, and emotional relevance. Without a story, Wrapped becomes noise.
Spotify Wrapped succeeds because it does a few things exceptionally well:
- It tells a story instead of presenting raw data
- It puts the user at the centre, not the brand
- It is carefully designed and easy to share
Without these elements, a Wrapped feature risks becoming a gimmick.
Applying This Thinking to Itinero
When we were building Itinero, one feature we seriously considered was a year-end Wrapped experience. The reasoning came from simple observation.
As the year draws to a close, people naturally want to reflect on where they’ve been, cities visited, countries explored, routes taken, and experiences chosen. Travel, by its nature, lends itself to reflection.
Because Itinero helps users plan itineraries with activities, routes, and budgets in one place, it sits at an interesting intersection of memory and intent.
Done right, a Wrapped experience in this context wouldn’t be about how many itineraries someone created or how many kilometres they travelled. It would be about telling a story.
It would make sense of travel choices, identify patterns, build an archetype of how someone explores the world, and present that insight in a way that feels thoughtful and personal.
Above all, it would be designed for sharing, not because sharing is the goal, but because the story feels worth telling.
A Product Thinking Takeaway
At the end of the day, Wrapped works not because it’s clever, but because it’s intentional. It understands that products aren’t just tools. They’re experiences shaped by human behaviour, emotion, and identity.
Not every product needs a year-in-review feature, and forcing one often does more harm than good. The real work of product thinking is knowing when a feature adds meaning to a user’s journey and when it’s just noise.
In the case of Itinero, travel is inherently reflective. People naturally want to look back at where they’ve been, what they’ve explored, and how they’ve moved through the world. When builders lead with empathy and storytelling, engagement becomes a by-product, not the goal.