The group trip planning app that does it all - vote on activities, split expenses with receipts attached, keep flights and tickets with the trip, share packing lists, and keep everyone in sync. From the first idea to the last flight home.
Vacationist is a free group trip planning app for iOS, Android, and web that lets a group vote on activities, split travel expenses, and share packing and shopping lists together - no account required to join.
Built for real trips with real people - messy schedules, split opinions, and all.
Vacationist works wherever a group needs to coordinate - whether it's a summer holiday or a Tuesday barbecue.
TL;DR
Vacationist is free, has no ads, and encrypts travel documents with AES-256. Receipts attach to expenses and boarding passes to flights, kept private to your trip. It's built in Switzerland, and anyone can join a trip via a single link without creating an account. Available today on iOS, Android, and the web.
Vacationist is a free trip app for collaborative group travel planning. You can suggest and vote on activities, split expenses, track vacation spending, manage accommodations, share shopping lists, and keep everyone in sync - all in one place. It works for everything from city breaks to multi-week road trips.
Log any group cost - dinner, accommodation, transport, or anything else - pick a category, attach the receipt, choose who paid, and split equally or with custom amounts. Vacationist tracks balances automatically and shows the simplest way to settle up when the trip ends.
Absolutely. Vacationist is ideal for van road trips and overland adventures. The shared calendar tracks each stop, the activity planner keeps the route flexible as plans evolve, the packing list keeps the van organized, and expense splitting makes shared fuel and campsite costs fair and transparent.
Vacationist combines activity voting, expense splitting, shared packing lists, and real-time collaboration in a single app designed specifically for group travel. Unlike general-purpose apps, everything is built around the group trip workflow - from suggesting activities and voting as a team to splitting costs and managing travel documents. And anyone can join without creating an account.
Yes. Many Vacationist users coordinate timeshare stays, vacation rentals, and shared holiday properties. Track who's arriving when, split running costs among co-owners, manage shared shopping lists for the property, and keep everyone's travel documents accessible for check-in.
Each trip in Vacationist acts as a shared workspace. Invite anyone via a single link - they join instantly, no account needed to participate. The vacation tracker view shows your full trip timeline, off-calendar events, and spending at a glance. Changes sync in real time so everyone stays up to date.
Yes. Attach a photo or PDF receipt to any expense - it stays private to your trip's members. For work trips, flag business costs as you go - expenses, hotels, flights, transport - and export a per-person report as a PDF, itemised by date and category, with links to the receipts.
Yes. Vacationist is free for every group, with no ads and no paid tier - every feature, including activity voting, expense splitting, and travel document encryption, is included at no cost.
No. Anyone can join a trip through a single invite link and participate - voting, adding expenses, checking off shopping-list items - without creating an account. Installing the app is optional.
Trip data is stored on Supabase infrastructure in Switzerland (Zurich) - the same country Vacationist is developed in, governed by Swiss data protection law. Travel documents are additionally encrypted with AES-256, a security measure GDPR also names as appropriate for protecting personal data (Article 32), and you can permanently delete your account and data at any time - a right GDPR grants EU users under Article 17.
Yes. Cached trip data stays available, and changes you make offline - votes, expenses, checked-off list items - are queued and sync automatically once you're back online, for up to a week without a connection.
Splitwise is a mature, focused expense-splitting app for ongoing shared costs like roommates or couples. Vacationist covers expense splitting too, plus activity voting, shared packing lists, transfer and flight management, encrypted travel documents, and no-account guest joins - built specifically for planning a group trip, not everyday shared finances.
Splitwise, Wanderlog and TripIt are good at what they do. Here is where a group-first trip app works differently - and where they are still the better pick.
| Feature | Vacationist | Splitwise | Wanderlog | TripIt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group voting on activities | Yes | No | No | No |
| Expense splitting | Yes | Yes | Partly | No |
| Business-cost report across expenses, hotels & transport | Yes | No | No | No |
| Shared shopping & packing lists | Yes | No | No | No |
| Join without an account | Yes | No | No | Partly |
| Price | Free, no ads | Free tier + paid subscription | Free tier + paid subscription | Free tier + paid subscription |
Where the others are stronger: Wanderlog for maps and place discovery, TripIt for building an itinerary automatically from confirmation emails, Splitwise for payment integrations and a far larger user base. Each comparison page has the full table.
Six terms that come up across the app, defined once so they never need re-explaining.
The strongest of Vacationist's five vote tiers - must do, like, open, skip, group blocker - meaning a group member has a real objection to an activity. Nothing is deleted automatically; the activity is flagged so the group can talk it through before anyone books.
The simplified list of payments that clears every balance in a trip using the fewest transfers possible, calculated automatically from every logged expense and who paid.
Tapping a trip's invite link and starting to vote, add expenses, and check off shopping-list items immediately - no account, no sign-up, no app install required.
Flagging an expense, accommodation, flight, rental car, or public-transport cost as a business cost. Flagged items feed a per-person business expense report - a PDF (and Markdown on the web), itemised by date and category - for work trips and team offsites.
Every accommodation, flight, rental car, and public-transport entry keeps its own currency, independent of the trip's main currency or later changes to it. Conversions use stored daily exchange rates.
A time-boxed, revocable permission an organizer can be granted to view a member's encrypted travel document. The clock starts only on the organizer's first view, expires after the duration the document owner set, lapses automatically after 7 days if never opened, and can be revoked at any time.
AES-256 is the U.S. federal standard for symmetric encryption, defined by NIST FIPS 197 - the same algorithm used for classified data.
GDPR Article 32 lists "the pseudonymisation and encryption of personal data" as an appropriate technical measure for protecting personal information.
Vacationist is developed in Switzerland and hosted there too: trip data lives on Supabase's Central Europe (Zurich) infrastructure, governed by Swiss data protection law.
Source Supabase - Available regions
GDPR Article 17 gives you the right to erasure - Vacationist's delete-account flow removes your personal data on request.
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