The trip planner that doesn't need a signal

The moment you actually need your trip plan is usually the moment you have no bars: a plane at boarding, a ferry between islands, a valley with no coverage, a foreign SIM that hasn't activated yet. Most travel apps show a spinner or a blank screen right then. Vacationist keeps working — for a full week without a connection — and quietly catches up when you're back online.

What still works with no connection

Everything you've already opened is on your phone, not just on a server:

• Read the whole plan — the itinerary, activities, accommodations, flights and transfers, shopping and packing lists, expenses and balances, and the trip calendar. If you looked at it online, it's there offline.
• Keep planning — add an expense, tick off a packing item, cast a vote, add an activity, edit a note. Your changes show up immediately and are held in a queue.
• Stay signed in — Vacationist never drops you to a login screen while you have a valid trip on your phone. (The old failure mode where a travel app logs you out on a plane and then can't log you back in because the login page won't load — that can't happen here.)

When your phone finds a connection again, the queued changes send themselves in order, the screens refresh, and live updates from the rest of the group reconnect on their own. You don't press "sync."

Built for a week, not a few minutes

Vacationist has been offline-first since it launched, and a 2026 overhaul made the offline window genuinely long:

• Cached trip data lasts 30 days — plenty for a two-week trip with no signal in the middle.
• You stay signed in for 7 days offline, with no server contact at all. Only after a week does Vacationist ask for your device fingerprint or PIN to extend it — a quick unlock, never a re-login you can't complete without internet.
• Queued changes survive an app restart and a low-battery shutdown. They're stored separately from everything else so a cache cleanup can't lose them.
• The active trip is pre-loaded. When you open a trip, its tabs and images are pulled onto the device in the background, so they're ready even if you go offline before tapping into them.

The one thing kept online on purpose

Encrypted travel documents — passport and ID details — are not cached on the device. They're decrypted only when you unlock the vault with a connection, and never written to local storage. That's a deliberate security trade-off: your most sensitive data doesn't sit on a phone that could be lost. Everything else about the trip is available offline.

Frequently asked questions

How long does Vacationist work offline?

For at least a week. Cached trip data is kept for 30 days, and your signed-in session is trusted for 7 days with no server contact — after that, a biometric or device-PIN unlock extends it without needing internet. In practice you'd have to be off-grid for a very long trip to hit any limit.

Do my offline changes ever get lost?

No. Changes you make offline go into a queue that's stored separately from the app's cache and survives closing or force-quitting the app. When you reconnect, they're sent in the order you made them. If a change can't be applied on the server (for example, someone deleted the activity you voted on), you get a clear message rather than a silent failure.

Can other people see my changes while I'm offline?

Not until you reconnect — there's no connection to send them over. Once you're back online, your queued changes sync and appear on everyone else's device, and their changes appear on yours. If two people edited the same thing while apart, the most recent change wins and you'll see the result on sync.

Does the web version work offline too?

The offline experience is built for the mobile apps (iOS and Android), where trip data is cached on the device. The web app at web.vacationist.app needs a connection — it's best for people joining a trip from a laptop, not for using on the move.

Why are travel documents not available offline?

Passport and ID fields are encrypted at rest and only ever decrypted in memory, behind your device's biometric lock, while you have a connection. Keeping them off local storage entirely means a lost or stolen phone never carries them. Every other part of the trip is cached and works offline.