An offline trip planner, with the limits written down

What works with no signal

The itinerary itself is stored on the device, not fetched when you open it. Landing in a new country with no roaming, on a plane, or on the third day of a hike, you can still open the app and read the entire plan: the day-by-day timeline, every booking with its times and reference numbers, your notes, the cost planner and who owes what.

You can also change things. Add an activity, fix a time, correct a booking reference, tick off a cost — the edit applies immediately on your screen and is queued for the server. The queue survives closing the app and restarting the phone, so an edit made in a tunnel is not lost because you rebooted before you found signal.

• Planning with other people

What does not, and why

Map tiles are the big one. The map is drawn from tiles served over the network, so with no signal you keep the plan and the pins’ coordinates but not the map imagery underneath them. Save an offline area in your maps app of choice for the places you will be walking around.

Adding a brand-new place needs a connection too, because looking up where somewhere is means asking a geocoder. You can still add the item offline and attach the place later. Forwarding a booking email into the trip needs a connection at both ends — you are sending mail — and live collaboration is not live while you are offline: other people’s changes arrive when you reconnect.

Saying this plainly is deliberate. Every app in this category claims to work offline, and the reason people search for whether that is true is that the claim usually turns out to mean something narrower than it sounded.

Edits you make on a plane

Offline edits are not held in memory and hoped for. They are written to a durable queue on the device and replayed in order when the connection comes back, which is why closing the app or running out of battery does not cost you the change.

When two people edited the same thing while one of them was offline, the edit that lands last is the one that sticks, and everyone sees the result as soon as they sync. For a trip itinerary that is almost always the right answer — the person who changed it most recently is usually the person who knows.

• Costs while you travel

Roaming, aeroplane mode and countries that block things

Aeroplane mode is the easy case: everything in the first list above works, and your queued edits go out when you land and reconnect.

Somewhere with heavy network restrictions, the app is unusual in that its core function does not depend on reaching a service. The plan is already on the phone. What you lose is the same list as above — tiles, lookups, sync — rather than access to your own itinerary.

The genuinely useful habit either way: open the trip once on wifi before you travel, so the current version is on the device.

Offline is a Pro feature — the honest reason

Full offline access is one of three things Pro gates, alongside forwarding booking emails and optimising the order of a day. Everything about planning a trip with other people — shared itineraries, voting, cost splitting, settle-up — is free.

The reason offline is the paid one rather than, say, collaboration: it is the feature people tell us is worth money, because it is the one that matters on the day the trip is actually happening. Gating collaboration would tax the behaviour the product is for.

• What Pro costs

Questions people ask