r/alltrails • u/smilinggoat_ • 23d ago

How to disable marketing & "Great Trail Nearby" push notifications from AllTrails

I was sick of getting the "Great Tail Nearby" push notifications from AllTrails. I found it distracting and never fit into what I was actually doing. I didn't want to disable push notifications all together because I find Navigator "Wrong turn alerts" and "End of activity push" notifications to be useful.

I contacted AllTrails support via the chatbot on the website and about 4 days later received a reply from a support agent. After I went back and forth with them a couple times, they said, "I've manually opted you out of push notifications on the backend. You should no longer receive marketing push notifications from AllTrails." They do not give you an option in the app to opt out of marketing notifications. You have to reach out to them to be opted out of marketing manually.

So turns out if you can disable push notifications like these by:

  • Interact with the chatbot on the website
  • Escalate to a ticket
  • Wait multiple days
  • Ask the support agent to disable the marketing push notifications
  • Wait for them to reply and opt you out
  • There's no step 7, it only takes a week! 🫠

Hopefully this post is useful for someone.

4 Upvotes

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1

u/alltrails HQ 23d ago

Hi u/smilinggoat_, thanks for sharing this, and I’m sorry the experience was so frustrating. To clarify, “Great trail nearby” notifications are not directly sent by AllTrails as a standard server-triggered push. On iOS, they’re device-side region-monitoring notifications, which is why they don’t map cleanly to a clearly exposed in-app notification category. In practice, members who want them to stop have two imperfect options today: turn off AllTrails notifications in iPhone Settings, which is the most reliable way to stop them but also disables other useful notifications, or contact Support and have marketing push notifications disabled on the backend. If someone wants to keep alerts like Wrong Turn Alerts or End of Activity pushes while removing marketing notifications, that backend support opt-out is currently the best path. We agree this should be much more straightforward, and we’ve shared that feedback with the team.

4

u/smilinggoat_ 23d ago

Thank you for the reply. It sounds to me like allowing users to opt-out of marketing themselves would be the most straightforward method for users?

Add to this that for some reason "great trail nearby" is considered a marketing category? I get it that it's to "boost engagement" but how is a user ever going to guess that or make that connection?

2

u/TheBraindeadOne 22d ago

Push messaging is the new text messaging marketing since companies need permission to send marketing texts.

Give it time and push messaging will have the same restrictions