You spent an hour planning the perfect ride in Komoot. Pinned the café at kilometre 45, marked the tricky descent, added a note about the water fountain that's easy to miss. You exported the GPX, sent it to your Wahoo ELEMNT — and on the day of the ride, every single waypoint looks exactly the same: a small, generic purple pin. No icons. No labels. No notes.
If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. It is one of the most common frustrations for cyclists who use Komoot for planning and Wahoo for navigation, and the reason is a straightforward technical mismatch between the two platforms.
What Komoot Does When You Export a Route
When you export a route from Komoot as a GPX file, your waypoints are included — but with Komoot's own internal category system baked in. Each waypoint carries a type tag that Komoot uses internally: things like food, water, viewpoint, danger, and so on.
GPX is an open standard, but how waypoint icons are defined is not. The standard field for an icon is called <sym> — short for symbol — and every GPS device manufacturer has its own set of valid values for it. A <sym> value that means "café" to Komoot means nothing to Wahoo, and vice versa.
The result: Wahoo sees valid waypoints in the file, renders them on the map, but has no idea what icon to assign — so it falls back to the default purple pin for everything.
The core problem in one sentence: Komoot and Wahoo speak different dialects of GPX, and neither one translates automatically for the other.
Why Notes Don't Appear Either
The same problem applies to waypoint notes. Komoot stores your notes in a <desc> field, which is part of the standard GPX spec. Wahoo does read this field — but only surfaces it in a specific way when you tap a waypoint during navigation, and only if the waypoint is correctly recognised as a point of interest in the first place.
If the waypoint type is not mapped correctly, Wahoo often skips the note display entirely. So that warning you wrote about the wet cobbles going into the descent just disappears.
Can You Fix It Manually?
Technically, yes. A GPX file is just XML, so you can open it in a text editor and change the <sym> values and waypoint structure by hand. In practice, this is tedious enough that most people don't bother — a typical Komoot route might have 10–20 waypoints, each requiring you to find the right Wahoo-compatible symbol name, edit the tag, and hope you haven't introduced a formatting error that breaks the whole file.
It also has to be redone every time you export a route.
The Quicker Fix
This is exactly the problem VeloPin was built to solve. You drag your Komoot GPX onto the page, it reads every waypoint and maps each Komoot category to the right Wahoo-compatible icon — food stops get a fork-and-knife icon, water points get a water drop, danger spots get a warning triangle. You can also edit names, add or change notes, and rename the route to keep your Wahoo library organised.
The whole process takes about two minutes, runs entirely in your browser (nothing is uploaded to any server), and produces a clean GPX you can send straight to your Wahoo.
Free tier: VeloPin is free for up to 4 edits per route and 10 edits per month — enough for most occasional riders. The Pro plan (€4/month or €35/year) removes those limits and adds multi-route comparison and version history.
Step-by-Step: From Komoot to Wahoo With Proper Icons
- Plan your route in Komoot as usual, adding waypoints with the correct categories (food, water, viewpoint, etc.).
- Export the route as a GPX file from Komoot's web app or mobile app.
- Open VeloPin and drag the GPX file onto the upload area.
- Review the waypoints — each one will show its detected category and the icon it will use on Wahoo. Edit any names or notes as needed.
- Optionally, rename the route so it's easier to find in the Wahoo app (e.g. Gravel / Starnberg Loop instead of just Starnberg Loop).
- Click Download and send the new GPX to your Wahoo via the companion app or USB.
A Note on Garmin
Garmin devices have the same underlying problem — they also use a proprietary symbol set — but the mapping is different. VeloPin currently focuses on Wahoo ELEMNT devices. Garmin support is on the roadmap.
The Broader Point
The frustrating reality is that GPX was designed to be a universal exchange format, but waypoint styling was never fully standardised. Until Komoot and Wahoo agree on a common vocabulary (which would require one of them to change), the gap has to be bridged somewhere in the middle. VeloPin is that bridge — small, fast, and browser-based so there's nothing to install and nothing stored on a server.
If you've been riding with a screen full of identical purple pins, give it a try. It takes less time than stopping to figure out which pin is the café.